Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

En réponse à Nik Taylor :


>How'd *that* happen?  :-)
The explanation I've seen is that the affirmative "ne" after a verb of fear 
is *not* cognate to the negative "ne", but descends from the Latin 
conjunction "ne" which, used to introduce subclauses after a verb of fear, 
has an "affirmative" meaning (while it has a negative meaning, negating 
"ut", when introducing a subclause after a verb of will). Of course, the 
Latin "ne" and "non" are related (and the French negative "ne" descends 
from "non" in unstressed use), so those two "ne" are ultimately related, 
but not directly.

Latin examples:
Suadeo tibi ut legas: I advise you to read
Suadeo tibi ne legas: I advise you not to read
Timeo ne veniat: I'm afraid he will come
Timeo ne non veniat: I'm afraid he will not come

Note that the use in Latin is just as strange: what with some verbs creates 
a *negative* subclause creates with verbs of fear an *affirmative* 
subclause. I read once something stating that it was actually a rather 
common phenomenon: that the semantics of verbs of fear made it uneasy for 
people to use truly affirmative subclauses after them. Fear being negative, 
the subclause must be in a negative form. I must say I love that idea, and 
be sure that Maggel will have something similar ;))) .


>Interesting distinction!  :-)
All due to "personne" taking over the negative meaning of "ne" while this 
one was disappearing :) .

> >
> > Jamais je n'ai entendu pareille sottise ! : Never have I heard such 
> nonsense!
>
>Can you drop the _ne_ there, saying "Jamais j'ai entendu pareille
>sottise"?  Or is that ungrammatical?
It's not that it's ungrammatical, it's that it's not common to put "jamais" 
in front of a sentence in spoken language. We rather raise our voice on 
"jamais" than front it. So it's possible, and perfectly grammatical in 
Spoken French, just not common to build a sentence that way.

> > Je ne sais... ;)))) It's *very* archaic literary style, but it's possible.
>
>:-)  And we English-speakers use French phrases like "Je ne sais quoi"
>:-)
We too :)) .
___________________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


> > 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").
>
>Is that unusual? The Swedish _alltid_ is transparently "all time" ... and I've
>always thought of "always" as "(on) all ways"="in all chunks of time".
I agree it's not unusual. It's just that French did that *a lot*, and with 
lots of nice and interesting shifts of meaning :))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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