I think you can in Europe.

There's a lot of things I like about languages. In general, the fascinate me. I especially like seeing how language changes and evolves over the centuries (I actually enjoyed HOTEL in Adams' class freshman year). But sometimes I just don't understand it, or rather, I don't understand the relationships between some compound words.

I was thinking the other night of the words inflate and deflate. Now, the root of these is flate (but we don't have the word in the English language, I check Wiktionary). Of course, it's a Latin root (meaning to breathe or blow), and the prefixes in- and de- have been added to the root, in- meaning into, and de- meaning to reversal or undoing. But it strikes me that these prefixes aren't opposites, and therefore the word deflate shouldn't be the antonym to inflate. Seems like exflate or unflate would better choices, or even deinflate if we're going to be technical.

But of course languages aren't technical, and this is doubly true of English (I blame the French, damn Normans). We don't normally have double prefix words, even though they would make sense. There are some, like antidisestablish, deconstruct (reconstruct, too), and some others that I can't think of right now, but generally if we want to show the opposite of some Latin derived word, we just switch prefixes, which really, we shouldn't do.

Don't even get my started on why we use certain Latin roots with prefixes, but not without. Like flate, and whelm (actually, I just looked and whelm is an English word, meaning to cover with water. And somehow from that we got our current usage of under- and overwhelm).