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French: "Je n’ai qu..." | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Lingua Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5582 days ago 186 posts - 319 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 9 of 13 17 September 2009 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The same construction exists in Italian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lingua Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5582 days ago 186 posts - 319 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 10 of 13 17 September 2009 at 3:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
"Je n'ai pas qu'un billet de 200 francs" makes perfect sense. It means the same as "Je n'ai pas seulement un billet de 200 francs". Edited by Lingua on 17 September 2009 at 3:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 13 17 September 2009 at 11:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Woops. That'll teach me to trust my high school teachers. :-(
Negative, Never, No, None, Nobody, Not. Non. Nein. Neoni. Nahi. Njet. Nic. Niks. Nach. It's almost universal in the Indo-European languages that negative words start with N. OK, in French the negative meaning has been migrating from the "ne" to the other bit, but the fact that this is essentially a negative structure can be seen from the way it exists in other languages:
It's not even uniquely Romance -- the Celtic languages use this as their main way of expressing "only" Scottish Gaelic: Chan eil agam ach aon not I do not have but one pound = I only have one pound. As I said before, this pattern also occurs in some archaic literary English and Scots. (I don't know whether this points to it having existed in older Germanic forms or if it's a Celtic calque.) So ne... que is, in fact, negative -- it simply says that the converse of the statement is not true. (In fact, it's a negative comparison, and there's other negative comparisons out there in various languages "It's no more than you would have done for me", for example.) Edited by Cainntear on 17 September 2009 at 11:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jimmymac Senior Member United Kingdom strange-lands.com/le Joined 6159 days ago 276 posts - 362 votes Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French | Message 12 of 13 17 September 2009 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've never seen this construction before. I would like it if a native French speaker could verify it for us. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Spiderkat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5818 days ago 175 posts - 248 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 13 17 September 2009 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've already explained about it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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