Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

On 22 May 2004 Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@F...>
wrote:

> Does Hungarian use an expression translated as "to have right"?
> Funny, so does French :))
  Yes, it's a true Hungarism from me, but I'd rather call it
Continentalism, cf. German "recht haben", Slovak "mat' pravdu",
Albanian "ka te: drejte:", etc.

> Nope. If we fear the cancellation of the action, we say: je crains
> qu'il ne vienne *pas*: I fear he will not come. "Je crains qu'il ne
> vienne" is for all purposes really affirmative.
  I see. But I found the following example in my dictionary:
"de'cidez-vous avant qu'il ne soit trop tard". It's a clear
negative for me, cf. Hungarian 'do:ntso:n, ami'g _nem_ ke'so"'.

  The same is true for English "I shall not go unless the weather
is fine" 'nem megyek el, ha(csak) jo' ido" _nem_ lesz'.

  I think that in these cases both English (cf. "_un_less"
conjunction makes a signle negative), and French had originally
negative. And they was only later re-interpreted as affirmative. I
think that this kind of borderline usage is highly "bound" , that
it's no use to include it in systemic analyses.

  (Apropos, can you place sentence "de'cidez-vous avant qu'il ne
soit trop tard" in negative, e.g. "*de'cidez-vous avant qu'il ne
soit pas trop tard"? The negated [=affrimative] pair of the
Hungarian equivalent doesn't exist.)

  Another borderline usage of the negative in French (and in other
Romance languages) is "ne .. que". "Il ne parle que le hongrois" is
semantically affirmative, cf. "il ne parle uniquement / seulement
le hongrois".

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