Re: Negation?

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