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French: What kind of ne? | ||
Tags: Meaning of words | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| hster Newbie Sweden Joined 5027 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Italian | Message 1 of 12 11 April 2011 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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From Racine's Phaedra:
Je pourrai de mon père émouvoir la tendresse, Et lui dire un amour qu'il peut vouloir troubler, Mais que tout son pouvoir ne saurait ébranler. I'm not sure what kind of ne this is in the last line. It could be a ne without a pas for negation. My favorite translation actually reads it this way. But I thought that you could only omit the ne rather than the pas if you were negating. It could be an expletive ne--this is literary French after all-- but I can't fit it into one of the categories of fear, doubt etc where the expletive ne occurs. Does anybody know? Thanks so much. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 12 11 April 2011 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is ne without a pas for negation, and this expression without "pas" is actually still possible in modern written French in a few cases ("je ne puis" from pouvoir is another exception from the general rule).
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| thecrazyfarang Diglot Newbie France thefarangsdiary.blog Joined 5051 days ago 18 posts - 25 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Thai | Message 3 of 12 11 April 2011 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Your analyse is right : this is a "ne" for negation, without a "pas".
About omiting "ne", I'd like to give an exemple : When we talk, we usually say "je sais pas", "je peux pas l'expliquer". But when we write these sentences, we write them "je ne sais pas", "je ne peux pas l'expliquer". In French, we say "bouffer les mots" (slang meaning "to eat the words") to explain this difference between oral and written form... When you have a discution, you can forget the "ne", but never forget the "pas" ! Of course, in French (like every language, I guess), there are some exceptions... ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 4 of 12 11 April 2011 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just another note that "ne saurait" is a fairly common expression, meaning roughly "couldn't" or "wouldn't". Edited by Arekkusu on 11 April 2011 at 3:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 12 11 April 2011 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to Wikipedia, this was written in 1677.
Hast thou considered that this was of a time with Shakespeare. In sooth there is much in English that has since changéd. Traditionally, "ne" was the obligatory negative marker in French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ikipou Diglot Newbie Norway lingua.ikipou.com/ Joined 4990 days ago 24 posts - 23 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 6 of 12 11 April 2011 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||
It does not really sound like old French actually. Someone could write this kind of poem today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 12 12 April 2011 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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The language of Ronsard, du Bellay and other poets from the 16. century Pleïade is still considered as Middle French, while Racine and Corneille wrote allegedly in early Modern French. But the actual difference is not very large. The main event that marks the border is the foundation of the French Academy in 1635, because the influence of the academy more or less froze the written version of the language (apart from a few things like -ois, which became -ais). And this is more like an institutional criterion than a linguistic one.
Old French is quite different, and again there isn't a welldefined border, but the language historians normally put the start of Moyen Français somewhere around 1400. At that time Occitan had stopped being a serious contender, and England and France gradully were separated (the Hundred Year's War raged in the period 1337-1453). In Old French "ne" was the real negation word, and words for small things like "mie", "goutte" were used as simple reinforcements ("pas" came relatively late). Expressions like "je ne saurais" are actually 'living fossils' that testify to this stage. That "pas" now can occur in the spoken language as the only negation is one of the strange quirks of French - one of those things that just happen in a language. But it arose out of a negation construction with two obligatory elements, which in itself was a weird development. Maybe the weakening of latin "non" to French "ne" has played a role here, and that could also explain that Spanish and Italian didn't follow the same path. Edited by Iversen on 12 April 2011 at 1:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6316 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 8 of 12 12 April 2011 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Did "pas" develop out of a lazier way of saying "point", or are the two developmentally unrelated?
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