eodrakken wrote:
Hi, Aidan. Welcome to the board.
Thank you. p@ (sorry to steal from you Glenn, it just seemed the appropriate response

)
eodrakken wrote:
Aidan wrote:
In formal French, for example, "Je n'ai pas de livre": I neg.-have not of book. (Though the "ne" is often dropped these days in normal speech).
Actually, I believe that literally means "I have not a step of book." I've heard that French started with just
ne before the verb, and eventually grammaticalised several idioms like "I have not a drop of water" and "I have not a bit of food", ending up with only
pas (which still means "step" as well).
Umm. No. "Pas"
also means "step", but it's much more common homonym is "not". The word meaning "step" comes from latin "passus" (realted to "pace", "passage", etc.), I don't know the exact etymology of the one meaning "not", but I do know it already had its modern meaning in 1080, so if they ever the same word (which, really, I doubt), it was long, long ago.
Je n'ai jamais de livres: I neg.-have never books
Je n'ai pas de livres: I neg.-have not books
Je n'ai rien: I neg.-have nothing
Je ne connais personne: I neg.-know no-one
French employs a two part negative, formally.
Oh, and yes "personne" is "no-one" in that context. "Un personne" is "a person", "deux personne" is two people, "de personnes" is people in general. Of course the -s doesn't change the pronunciation at all, so "no-one", "person" and "people" all sound identical. As does "deux" and "de". In French there are meaning distinction which are made in the written language that you ust have to figure out from context when it's spoken, becuase there are
so many silent letters.
eodrakken wrote:
I just realized there's another interesting point to be made about the French negative. It is "I don't have book", not "I don't have books" as we say in English.
It's actually more like "I don't have bookness". When you talk about a lack of something in French you put it into the uncountable form (can't remember the correct term for this); the form you use all the time for things like water. But, yeah, it does address that loophole that's in English.