Re: French becoming agglutinative (was: deepfriedmars.com)

From: M. Ranjit Mathews (ranjit_mathews_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/29/04 

Date: 29 Nov 2004 12:51:19 -0800

Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au> wrote ...
> > Can it be turned into an infinitive and used to translate the
> > capitalised portion of the sentence, "FOR ONE NOT TO TELL SOMEONE
> > ABOUT IT would not be proper".
>
> Standard French: "ne pas en parler à quelqu'un ne serait pas
> bien".

If "il ne lui en avait pas parlé" cannot be used in toto in other
contexts such as this one, that makes it difficult to consider it a
single complex word.

> Colloquial: ça serait pas bien, de [ne] pas en parler à quelqu'un.
>
> There is no cross-reference to "à quelqu'un" because
> "quelqu'un" is indefinite. But you can say that:
>
> Ça serait pas bien, de pas leur en parler, aux gens.
>
> (leur = to them, en = about it).
>
> Oh, forgot "FOR ONE". Difficult. Perhaps even impossible.
> Let me try with "FOR ME" instead (feeling like Grapheus now
> with all those CAPITALS).
>
> Moi, de pas leur en parler, ça m'irait pas.
>
> See? The cross-reference ("me") goes with "aller",
> not with "parler".

Thanks for trying; I'd have to learn more than a smattering of French
words and phrases to make sense of the grammar.

> Or: Pour moi, de pas leur en parler, ça serait
> dégueulasse. No cross-reference to "me".
>
> Try again... Moi, que je leur en parle pas...
> A cross-reference, but no infinitive.

Quantcast