Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>> 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 :) .

I suppose that accounts for the facts well enough. Still, it was utterly
perplexing to an 11 year-old encountering French grammar for the first
time, and assuming that, whatever it might be, it surely wasn't a
work-in-progess :).


>>  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.

Yes. I believe that there were once a number of other negatives, evolved
from nouns other than "pas" ("step"), like "miette" ("crumb"?) and
"goutte" ("drop", I suppose). I suppose for a brief, rather amusing,
period in French history, these were linked to specific verbs by their
meanings, so that we had "je ne vais pas" and "je ne mange miette", but
not the of course completely meaningless "je ne vais miette" :).

>> 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.

Ah, I didn't realise the demarkation was so precise. Handy, if a bit
boring ;).

[much fascinating stuff snipped]

> 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 :)) .

s.
--
Stephen Mulraney   ataltane@ataltane.net
    Klein bottle for rent  ...  inquire within.

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