Re: fallire (was: a King's proverb)

En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:

>
> In fact in Old French the present tense of this verb was as follows:
> 1st sing.  _je fail_ or by analogy with 2n & 3rd pers _je faux_
> 2nd sing.  _tu fals_, _tu faus_, _tu faux_ (the latter merely
> orthographic
> variant of _faus_)
> 3rd sing.  _il falt_, _il faut_
>
> 1st plural _nous falons_, _nous faillons_
> 2nd plural _vous falez_, _vous faillez_
> 3rd plural _il(s) falent_, _il(s) faillent_
>
> The future had a variety of competing forms:
> je falrai, je faldrai, je faudrai, je faur(r)ai, je faillerai, je
> faillirai
>
Well, no wonder why it got simplified :) .

> What's happened, of course, is that the verb has split into two:
> _faillir_
> has ironed out all the Old French irregularities and given rise to a
> modern
> -ir verb, keeping its original meaning of "to fail" (can it still have
> the
> old meaning "to lack" = manquer?).
>
In fact, _faillir_ is not very much used, and virtually never in the present
tense. Mostly in writing, there is the expression "faillir à" which is
equivalent to "manquer à" and means "to fail (when doing sthg), not to do (what
was supposed to be done". For instance: "faillir à son devoir": "to fail to do
what your duty was". The second use of "faillir" is directly completed by a
verb. In this case, it means "not to miss, but from a very short range, to
nearly miss". In this case, it's usually translated in English as "nearly". As
you can see, both meanings are related to "to lack" and "to fail", but not
exactly equivalent. I like this verb, it's quite difficult to translate without
lengthy explanations :) .

> But the old irregular 3rd person singular has remained with the
> derived
> impersonal meaning: it is necessary; from the latter has developed by
> analogy, as I showed in my last mail, the infinitive _falloir_ which
> AFAIK
> was unknown in Old French.
>
> Such Gallic inventiveness  :)
>
Thank you :) .

> >
> >Very true. Now I have to think what *fallíre would bring in Narbonósc
> (and
> >what
> >meaning I will give it, Narbonósc is specialized in non-obvious
> semantic
> >shifts
> >:) ).
>
> Is that so?  It ought to give rise to at least two new verbs then  ;)
>
:) I will consider that. In this case French has so strange and non-obvious
semantic drifts, I don't how I'm gonna do better :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr