Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

En réponse à Stephen Mulraney :


>I can think of phrases such as "personne ne sait que..." ("no one know
>that..."), which, however uses "personne".
Exactly. When you happen for some reason to use the second part of the 
negation in front of the first, you needn't add another one afterwards. 
Another example:

Jamais je n'ai entendu pareille sottise ! : Never have I heard such nonsense!

>  Although "personne" is one of
>the class of words that's used with "ne" (like "pas"), it seems a bit
>different in its behaviour to me. Can a Francophone give me an example
>of "ne" without "pas" (or "personne", "rien", "jamais" or any of the
>others)?
Je ne sais... ;)))) It's *very* archaic literary style, but it's possible.

>I say "personne" seems different in its behaviour because it seems very
>counter-intuiutive that it should be have a negative meaning.
So what? Jamais is also originally positive (meaning "ever", and still 
sometimes used in this sense in some set phrases), just like "rien" (from 
Latin "res": thing). It's just a case of transfer of negative contents: 
"rien" has finished its transfer, "jamais" is close to it, and "personne" 
is still not quite through, but it's getting there :) .

>  You say
>"il ne sait rien" ("he knows nothing"), yet "rien" can be used without
>"ne" to mean "nothing" (and not just in "ne ... rien" constructions
>where the "ne" has been dropped). Similarly with "jamais", which clearly
>means "never" in all contexts, and "pas" which similarly means "not".
Except that all have an originally positive meaning. The "pas" of negation 
is actually just the same as the noun "pas" meaning "step". See my post of 
a little earlier to see how it evolved that way. And as I said, "jamais" 
originally meant "ever" and still has some affirmative uses, in literary 
language.

>But are there examples of "personne" being used with a positive meaning
>(that is, meaning "someone" or "a person", not "no one")? Or does
>"person" actually mean unambiguously and universally "no one"?
When you use "personne" with an article: "une personne", "la personne", 
i.e. as a noun, it's unambiguously affirmative. Only when used without 
article, that is to say adverbially, it becomes unambiguously negative. As 
I wrote in my earlier post, the two uses never overlap, so there's no 
ambiguity.

>Getting back to the subject at hand, if "personne" ever has a positive
>meaning (and I ask mainly because I thought that I had an example, but
>can't remember it right now), mightn't this suggest that there is indeed
>some kind of circumfixion going on, in the case of "ne...pas".
Nope, because the case of "pas" is actually identical to the case of 
"personne". It's just that "pas" has lost its semantic meaning in the 
negative construction quicker than the others.

>  Yet even
>so, I wouldn't expect "ne...personne" to change its meaning just because
>the "ne" was elided in speech!
Yet that's what happened.

>At this point I'm forced to stop trying to rationalise it, and to humbly
>bow before indominitable Usage.
Good, because French is only one example of such transfers of negative 
contents from an unaccented and ultimately lost word to an accented word of 
originally affirmative meaning.


>Quite apart from such usages, it's typical of spoken French to omit the
>"ne" where it might be expected, so that "Il ne sait pas" becomes "Il
>sait pas".
Actually, it's more correct to say that "ne" has completely disappeared 
from spoken French. We don't just omit it: it has never been there to begin 
with :)) . Only the literary language still uses "ne". As I told a few 
times already, French is in a situation comparable to Rome in Cicero's 
time, with a separation, getting bigger and bigger, between spoken and 
written language.


>What does "a tout jamais pour jamais" mean? It's rather opaque to me,
>especially, if you're suggesting, "jamais" means "always" (or "sometimes"?)
"A tout jamais" does indeed mean "forever". It's one of the set phrases I 
was talking about where "jamais" still has its original affirmative 
meaning. You should try and find something about Old and Middle French. You 
would see that in those languages, "rien" and "jamais" have an affirmative 
meaning.

Another example is "aucun", which is an adjective. It originally meant 
"some" (sometimes "someone") and is coming from Latin "aliquem" of the same 
meaning. Today it means "no" as an adjective ("aucun homme": "no man"). 
Just like "rien" or "jamais" or "personne", it has taken over negative 
meaning from being used with the slowly disappearing "ne".

And look at "mais": "but". It comes from "magis": more (and is cognate with 
Spanish "mas": more), and was originally used in that sense, a positive 
sense. But it changed from quantitative to temporal meaning "earlier" to 
adversative meaning "rather" (in French, "rather" is "plutôt", 
transparently "plus tôt": earlier). Note that "jamais" was originally "ja 
mais" and is thus related to an earlier affirmative temporal meaning of 
"mais" :))) .

The history of French adverbs is quite an interesting one. It shows a lot 
of nominal phrases transforming slowly into adverbial units (often still 
analysable, like "toujours": "always", originally "everyday"). It's a great 
source to understand how syntactic changes and semantic changes can lead an 
expression to mean the opposite it originally meant :)) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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