French: What kind of ne? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

French: What kind of ne?
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Ari
Heptaglot
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Norway
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Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
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Message 9 of 12

12 April 2011 at 2:58pm | IP Logged

ChristopherB wrote:

Did "pas" develop out of a lazier way of saying "point", or are the two developmentally unrelated?

The "pas" means "step". I think it developed from a specific expression, like "Je ne vais (un) pas", "I won't take a step", to being generalized into an intensifying negative marker, to becoming almost obligatory. The same sort of thing happened in Swedish, where the word "jätte", meaning "giant" has evolved into a general intesifier, leading some conservative prescriptivists to peeve on expressions like "jätteliten" (literally "small as a giant", but actual meaning "really small").
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cntrational
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India
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Message 10 of 12

12 April 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged

Iversen wrote:

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.

It isn't just a quirk of French, but something that has happened to many languages. It's known as Jespersen's cycle -- languages go through a cycle where one word for negation is replaced by another, going through a period where both were used. It has happened to all of the Germanic languages, including English:

Old English: ic ne seah
Middle English: I ne saugh nawiht
Early Modern English: I saw not.

And now it's happening to French.
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Ari
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Message 11 of 12

12 April 2011 at 5:04pm | IP Logged

cntrational wrote:

Old English: ic ne seah
Middle English: I ne saugh nawiht
Early Modern English: I saw not.

That's pretty funny, because it has aquired the exact opposite meaning of the correlating Swedish sentence, where "nå't" (short for "något" and pronounced just like English "not") means "something". Thus: "I saw not" correlates word for word with "Jag såg nå't", but has the exact opposite meaning, the Swedish sentence meaning "I saw something".
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hster
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Speaks: Italian

Message 12 of 12

14 April 2011 at 11:57am | IP Logged

Thanks all, very interesting.

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