Volitionality and passing gas

In Sherpa, like in other Tibetic languages, a distinction is made between volitional and non-volitional verbs, meaning that when you describe an action in Sherpa you usually need to specify if it is either 'on purpose', or accidental. In English this distinction is sometimes made lexically with verbs of perception, as in the difference between 'seeing' and 'looking' (or 'watching') as well as 'hearing' and 'listening'. However, in Tibetic languages, this distinction extends to most other verbs as well.

While there are some interesting pairs, my favourite one so far from the Sherpa-English dictionary is:

སླེན་ཤོར་ pen shor (v.inv) = to fart (involuntarily)

སྤེན་གཏོང་ pen tong (v.vol) = to fart

How volitionally can one fart?

I friend you, you unfriend me

Over lunch yesterday, a few Singaporean friends and I were celebrating the fact that 'friend' is now a commonly used verb. Prior to the advent of Facebook, 'friend' as verb - pronounced closer to 'fren' - had been relegated to the realm of Singlish kid speak. For example:

Kid 1: I fren u, u fren me.

Kid 2: (I) Dun fren u.
('dun' sounds like 'doe' with vowel nasalisation - derived from 'don't')

Or something like that - it's been a while since I was in kindergarten.

It conveys a sense of liking someone, something to the effect of 'I want to be friends with you, do you want to be friends with me?'. But adults may still jokingly say to one another, 'I dun/donch fren you' if the other person offends them mildly.

I then asked people if they preferred the verb 'unfriend' or 'defriend' (neither of which is in Singlish kid speak). The unanimous response at the table was 'unfriend', even though after some consideration, people realised that 'un-' generally negates adjectives while 'de-' negates verbs. One reason suggested for why 'unfriend' sounded better was the existence of the word 'unfriendly'.

Having done a bit of googling, I found this article: The Un-believable Un-Verb from September 21, 2009, which explains that there is an 'un-' prefix added to verbs (marking the reversal of an action, e.g. 'unfasten', 'unmask' - and also 'undo') which has a different etymology to the 'un-' prefix added to adjectives. 'Unfriending' someone on Facebook therefore makes more sense since you are undoing the action of 'friending' them.

But I wonder if there are still people who would prefer 'defriend'?