Re: Ant: Re: Most challenging features of languages?

Hi!

Elliott Lash <erelion12@...> writes:
> > >Oh, dear God, I _still_ haven't figured out what
> > >construction to use in what case! 'Je n'ai pas de
> > >fromage' or 'je n'ai pas du fromage'? Frustrating!
> > >
> >
> > It's strange that I never noticed that, "J'ai DU
> > fromage" but "Je n'ai pas
> > DE fromage", "J'ai DE LA soupe" but "JE n'ai pas DE
> > soupe"
> >
>  for me, I've always rationalized it by saying that
> the negative is much less defined than the positive
> version of the sentence, hence the object is
> unaccompanied by the definite article. Similar things
> happen in Russian (where for some verbs, the object
> becomes genitive in the negative, whereas in the
> positive the object is in the accusative [except for
> animate nouns, which are always genitive when they're
> an object]). Also, in Finnish, the partitive instead
> of ...whatever objective case they have, is used in
> the negative.
For me, that was also no problem -- I internalised 'pas de' quite
quickly (and I understood it in a similar way: why bother about
definedness when there's *nothing*).

Hmm, was there anything especially weird about French?  Hmm.  I have
problems remembering when to use subjonctive.

Note that in Finnish, the partitive is also used in positive sentences
when the action has imperfective aspect.  So 'I am building a house'
and 'I build houses' have 'house(s)' in partitive, but 'I have built a
house.' uses accusative (since the house is referred to as a whole).
So this is more what I link to the usage of 'de' in general in French,
not to the article ('je veux *du* the': I don't want all the the there
is, but only part of it, so partitive / de).

But then, 'Rakastan sinua' has 'sinä' = 'you' in partitive, too.
It means 'I love you.'  Part of you only?  Hopefully not. :-)

I think the use of partitive is lexicalised in Finnish, which makes it
less logical...

**Henrik

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