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Re: Negation?

From:FFlores <fflores@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 7, 1999, 15:12
Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...> wrote:
> > Exactly! I understand that I was not very clear (damn English!). What I > seek is negation without a word or words that have the concept of 'not' in > them, like my use of 'to refuse to' (it's very affirmative, believe me!) as > a negation.
It all depends on how much you use these words and phrases. If you 'negate' by using 'refuse', 'stop', etc., I think it's likely that the speakers will narrow the set of 'negating' words to just a few of them, make them grammatical, and in 1000 years or so they won't remember that their word(s) for 'not' were actually descended from old verbs. More or less, I guess, like the adverb mark <-mente> in Spanish. Most hispanohablantes will be probably laugh at me if I told them it was the separate word _mente_ in an idiomatic phrase. --Pablo Flores