Etymology of the French negation

V

vince

Senior Member
Los Angeles, CA
English
Hi everyone,

What is the reason that French people use the word "pas" (English: "step", Spanish/Portuguese: "paso", Italian: "passo") when they negate a sentence?

I don't see the connection between the general negative and the concept of a step.

It is amazing that in modern spoken French, "pas" has become the entire negative, supplanting the nasal sound used to mark the negative in most Indo-European languages. (in other words, "ne" (no) is on its way out).

What are your theories?

I am theorizing that perhaps it evolved from slang replacements for negatives like "ne... point", that perhaps were used to strengthen a negative statment?
 
    • The explanation I've seen is that in earlier times it was normal to reinforce the ne with a word that was related to the meaning of the verb and you'd get things like

    je ne marche pas - I don't walk a step
    je ne bois goutte - I don't drink a drop
    je ne mange mie - I don't eat a crumb

    but eventually these words lost their distinctive meaning and simply became markers of negation, and then pas and point drove out the other possibilities (although I don't know why those two won out). Something similar must have happened with ne...personne and ne...rien except that those constructions kept their specific meaning.

    I found this document (in French) that has a section on the history of French negation.
     
    Yes, that’s it. The evolution we are seeing now (dropping ne, only using pas) is still part of a development described as Jespersen’s cycle, and it’s a phase languages like English and Dutch have gone through already.

    Typically languages start off with a preverbal negation marker, which is typologically the preferred place. This is stage 1:

    Some Older French :): je ne bouge ‘I don’t move’; Old English: ic ne secge ‘I don’t say’; Non-attested, invented, Old Dutch: dat en mag ‘that may not’


    At some point this marker becomes phonetically less salient. Not salient enough, in fact, to support a heavy semantic load like negation. So the negation gets strengthened by another element, typically surrounding the verb: NEG V NEG. That element may be a negative polarity item like in French (and in Colloquial English for example: I didn’t do sh*t), or a double negation, like in English and Dutch (not and niet originally meant 'nothing' < na-wiht ‘NEG-thing’. Of course, at first these strengthening elements often needed some specific context, like movement in French, but basically that’s stage 2:

    Present-day French: je ne bouge pas; Middle English: I ne seye not; Middle Dutch: dat en mach niet


    In the completing third phase, the less prominent original negation particle is left out, and the more salient new particle carries the negation on its own.

    Colloquial / Future French: je bouge pas; Later Middle English: I say not; Present-day Dutch: dat mag niet


    As you can see, Dutch and English completed the cycle, as German and Danish did too, by the way. French is getting there. English is a phase ahead in that the negation marker has moved up to a preverbal position again (at least preverbal to the lexical verb!). As a clitic on auxiliaries (-n’t), the negation marker in English is often not very salient anymore, again, which could trigger the beginning of a new Jespersen’s cycle. But the periphrastic construction seems to hold.
     
    I dont know if anyone can help be but I am looking for the history of the word pas. The previous threads did have a link which was was not able to open.
    The explanation by modus seems to be what I remember having learned at school. I think I remember the 'commoners' would hear the aristrocracy saying
    things like 'je ne marche pas' and this idea of not even taking a step made its way to be being part of general negation. If anyone can give me a clearer explanation I would be much obliged!
     
    The old medieval French first used the Latin negation non with verbs, but being in unstressed position the word turned into the form nen, then ne in front of a consonant and n' in front of a vowel. Accordingly the negation became so weak that it was not heard clearly or could'nt be even heard at all ( in on n'avait, for example ) ; so very early it had to be strengthened by a substantive placed after the verb , more rarely in front of the verb as long as subject pronouns were not essential as in Point n'en veux, or Point n'est besoin which is still used .
    As modus.irrealis says, several words, first semantically congruent with the verb and most of them designating something tiny, were used as mere direct objects (it's impossible to add another direct object after je ne bois goutte in the same way as after Je ne vois rien), then they were "grammaticalised" , merging into the original negation and loosing their own meaning.
    So "pas" comes from Latin "passus", a step and "point" from "punctum", a small parcel of land.
    Further explanations can be read here ( chiefly 1.4 and 3.1 ) .

    To confirm Joaness's explanations I'd like to point out that non-I.E languages belonging to various families also use the structure Neg+Verb+ Neg : ma+ Verb +Sh (sh coming from shay meaning thing ) in some Arabic "dialects" ; ma+Verb+bu" in Burmese ; mana+Verb+chu in Quechua.

    http://forum.wordreference.com/member.php?u=54614
     
    You'll find here a link to wiki.
    I like the funny way you talk about "future French" !:D
    Colloquial / Future French: je bouge pas;
    Click to expand...
    ...but I'm not sure to be convinced.
    That's right, in colloquial French, when speaking, you can drop the second part of the negation.
    But they are cases in which you use only the first part of it (ne), and when you write, it's not allowed to use the second part alone...

    Then, I have another reason why I'm not sure it will be the evolution.

    As you said, in all the Indo-European languages, the negation has a "n" as a stem and this "n" does persist in the adverb "non"...
    On the other hand, we tend to speak more and more English in Europe and I don't feel like French could evolve alone far from other languages...
     
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    itka said:
    But they are cases in which you use only the first part of it (ne)
    Click to expand...
    Yes, I've always thought those are interesting 'exceptions'. But I've always felt those expressions to be rather marginal and of a somewhat higher register. What do you think?

    itka said:
    As you said, in all the Indo-European languages, the negation has a "n" as a stem and this "n" does persist in the adverb "non"...
    On the other hand, we tend to speak more and more English in Europe and I don't feel like French could evolve alone far from other languages...
    Click to expand...
    Hm. I really don't see the problem to be honest. Just because you don't have a negation with an /n/ you have evolved far from other languages? And, well, still, so what, why would that be a problem? And who would prevent it from happening for what reason?

    I think a good reason why dropping ne will not be the eventual evolution (at least not any time soon), is because of something else you mentioned: written language (and of course the fact that people focus too much on it).
     
    Joannes said:
    Yes, I've always thought those are interesting 'exceptions'. But I've always felt those expressions to be rather marginal and of a somewhat higher register. What do you think?
    Click to expand...

    Agreed.

    Joannes said:
    I think a good reason why dropping ne will not be the eventual evolution (at least not any time soon), is because of something else you mentioned: written language (and of course the fact that people focus too much on it).
    Click to expand...

    In a society with a high level of literacy the written language does tend to operate as a break on the spoken language. I do not think that the omission of ne can be said to be a universal feature of spoken French, unlike, say, the use of the passé composé for the passé historique, but rather a feature of casual spoken French.
     
    prisonnier.jpg
    The image here is from Valérian et Laureline - L'empire des mille planètes, published in 1971 (inspiration for Han Solo's later fate in Star Wars?) Note the negation "Vous ne pouvez faire cela" instead of "Vous pouvez pas faire cela" that I had expected in spoken language. Were the rules for what part of a negation you can omit different in 1971?
     
    drhex said:
    The image here is from Valérian et Laureline - L'empire des mille planètes, published in 1971 (inspiration for Han Solo's later fate in Star Wars?) Note the negation "Vous ne pouvez faire cela" instead of "Vous pouvez pas faire cela" that I had expected in spoken language. Were the rules for what part of a negation you can omit different in 1971?
    Click to expand...
    They're using the vous treatment and addressing a prince, so one should expect a language slightly more soutenu, I guess.
     
    "Ne" is increasingly being dropped with all verb forms even "vous" and so much so that even educated people do it without even realizing it. I believe it will fall out of use the same way the "nous" verb form has.
     
    vince said:
    What is the reason that French people use the word "pas" (English: "step", Spanish/Portuguese: "paso", Italian: "passo") when they negate a sentence?
    Click to expand...
    Bonsoir à tous ,
    ce pas n'est pas le substantif masculin qui désigne (sens -2-) " Action de faire passer l'appui de son corps d'une jambe à l'autre en marchant." mais tout simplement un adverbe ( sens -1- ) qui marque la négation Il ne faut pas confondre les sens des homonymes. Donc à mon avis, la discussion n'a pas lieu d'être. Elle est close.
     
    Even if they weren't addressing a royal, don't expect 70s comics to adhere to a spoken register consistently, or even most of the time. I've never read Valérian et Laureline, but my general impression of other Pilote titles is that their language was often quite a bit stiffer than the contemporary Spirou comics.
     
    That's it. They correspond to

    - Catalan:
    Je ne bois goutte. — No bec gota.
    Je ne mange mie. — No menjo mica.
    Je ne vois point. — No hi veig punt.
    Je ne marche pas. - No camino pas.

    - Aragonese:
    Je ne bois goutte. — No bebo gota.
    Je ne mange mie. — No mincho mica.
    Je ne vois point. — No i veigo pon.
    Je ne marche pas. - No camino pas.

    The difference is that some of these are dated, uncommon, or used in rather fossilized expressions. And the pas is not compulsory for negative sentences, it just reinforces the negative as "at all" would in English: No m'ho crec pas. I don't believe it at all.
     
    I know it's off topic, but maybe it can be of interest to somebody that in the dialect of my hometown (Bologna, Northern Italy) the negation particle corresponding to French 'pas' is brisa (Engl. pron. breezah), which means crumb. So originally "not even a crumb", e.g. I don't want = A n'voi brisa. It's the same pattern as in French (many North-Italy dialects belong to the 'Gaulish-Italic' group).
    I think that the Italian colloquial usage of such particles as 'mica' - as signalled by Olaszinhok - might also generally be due to the influence of the French pattern.
     
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    Those all have very old roots being present in medieval texts already with bleached semantics (you don't really find verb-negator links like "je ne bois goutte" even in their oldest attestations, the variation seem dialectal, with some regions favouring one negator or another) so rather than French influence, it's best to think of it as a general phenomenon in a large dialectal zone of Latin, of which French was a part.

    Occitan also has brica or bric as a cognate of brisa, but it's an emphatic negator

    There's some other adverbs of negation in Romance that seem semantically less tied to smallness, like Occitan ges (< gens), very dominant in the Middle Ages but that lost out to pas, or Walloon nin or Piedmontese nen(t), of uncertain origin (nec ente? ne gentem?) but cognate to It. niente, where the semantic path has to have been different (I saw noone at all > I saw nothing > I didn't see)
     
    Possibly of interest: In many of the Arabic dialects negation is by combining the historic negative particle mā and the suffix -š, for example:

    baʽrif “I know”
    mābaʽrifš “I don’t know”

    The suffix -š derives from Classical šayʼ “thing”. So mābaʽrifš is literally “I do not know a thing”.
     
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