Re: Negation?

At 12:12 07/07/99 -0300, you wrote:
>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.
>
        Of course, that is what happens to Notya (at a very slow rate, as Notya is
over all a written, second language with some oral use). Even if it still
has a semantic meaning of 'refuse', 'wa' is used unstressed when meaning
negation and so lose some of its meaning and becomes more a simple negating
word. That's not what I want to do with Tj'a-ts'a~n.

>
>--Pablo Flores
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html