Re: Origins of French partitive, pas, etc.

On Dec 31, 12:18 pm, kj <so...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm learning French and I'm mystified by several syntactic features
of French that have no counterpart in any other language I know
(not that I know that many, but still), certainly not in any other
Romance language I know.

I am most intrigued by the French so-called "partitive article"
(J'ai bu DU vin.  Literally "I drank OF THE wine."), as well as

I've been meaning to mention this for weeks. There's currently a learn-
a-language ad on radio where a guy boasts he can order in French and
astonishes his friends by saying to the waiter, "Je voudrais le poulet
et le riz." (Which strikes me as wrong on at least three counts.)
Would you buy a language-instruction system from that company?

the use in French of particles like "pas", "plus", "personne",
"rien", etc. in negative constructions (Elle ne supporte PAS le
brocoli), which has become essentially mandatory.

In particular, I would like to know WHY these peculiar constructs
arose in the first place.

It is my understanding that they were not present in ancient French
(say before the 10th c. AD).  When exactly and, most importantly,
WHY did the speakers of French feel the need to use these novel
forms?

There are no "why"s in vocabulary change. What now appear as negative
particles and specifiers started out as intensifiers (not one STEP!),
eventually turned obligatory, and now (in speech) pretty much replace
the tiny negative particle "ne."

What prompts this particular line of inquiry is having read long
ago that the evolution of French phonology had necessitated
compensatory changes in other areas of spoken usage.  The example

That's true in all language everywhere. There's a constant battle
between ease of articulation and success of communication. English has
lost almost all traces of its ancestral case system, and as a result
has much more strict rules of word order than highly inflected
languages.

given at the time to illustrate this process was the inversion in
the order of use frequency of the synonyms "las" and "fatigue" (the
latter becoming the more frequently used over time), because the
growing phonetic similarity between "las" and the adverb of place
"la" had become a source of problematic ambiguities (e.g.  The
sentence "Il est las" (He is tired) began to sound too much like
"Il est la" (He is here/there)).

They're actually identical.

Sometimes "pernicious homonymy" can persist for generations with no
ill effects on communication. (If you ask, "Ou se trouve Paul?" and
you hear the above sentence as the answer, do you think the reply is,
"He's tired"? If you ask, "Comment va-t-il?" would the answer be,
"He's there"?)

I wonder if the origins of the partitive and the negative particles
like "pas" can be traced to similar compensations of phonetic
developments in the evolution of French.

I'm looking for some references on this subject, from the point of
view of the historical evolution of linguistic structures.

Passim in historical lingustics textbooks.

Needless to say, I'm not a linguist by any stretch (though I took
some linguistics in college and loved it).  Therefore, I'd prefer
a reference aimed at the general public, but absent that, I'm ready
to plunge into the more technical stuff.

I'll go with the three authors named here last week: Guy Deutscher,
The Unfolding of Language; Ron Macaulay, The Social Art; and Jean
Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay?

If you want to go on to something more textbooky, those by R. L. Trask
are superbly accessible. Larry Trask was a sci.lang regular until his
premature death a couple of years ago, and just searching him in the
archive will yield hours of instructive and entertainnig reading.
.

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