Re: French syntax (was: Italian Particles)

At 19:02 25/04/00 +0200, you wrote:
>On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>> No, don't use "en". Strange that foreigners want to use it so much :)) .
>
>Probably because we (at least I) were trained to understand "dans" as
>purely "inside" (material location), not for any other sense of "in".
>
Yet it has other senses than pure material location. In fact, 'en' as a
preposition is used (at least in Spoken French) only for the result of a
transformation (se déguiser en: to disguise in - or as? I don't know the
correct English expression -), for gerunds (en volant: flying - or stealing
:) -), with a few names of towns beginning with 'a', instead of 'à' for
location (en Avignon), and with names of languages (without article: en
français, but dans la langue latine). The rest is taken by 'dans'.

Well, I shouldn't be too far with this explanation.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)