(Untitled)

[wwidsith]

Notes to myself on semantics of the French word dérober, in the hope that I don't have to keep looking it up EVERY GODDAMN TIME, with examples from Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.

The root meaning (from Germanic, related to English rob) is ‘to steal’ (construed with à to indicate ‘from’):

... quand il fut sûr, bien sûr qu'elle n'y était plus, que c'en

Comments

[ruakh]

> And ‘hide’ in an intransitive sense can be achieved by using the reflexive (or pronominal) form: ¶ […] ¶ Strangely, this pronominal form also often means ‘to give way, collapse’: ¶ […]

S'évanouir has a similar pair of senses.

BTW, am I the only one who has difficulty with French verbs that take à meaning "from"? The same thing happens with voler and with emprunter, and I find it takes me some mental effort to get it right.

(The funny thing is, Hebrew also allows לְ־ "to" with גָּנַב "to steal", but in my head I so strongly associate French with English that while Hebrew comparisons can help me consciously remember a construction, they never help me internalize it or find it "normal", so to speak.)

[wwidsith]

Yep I know exactly what you mean. Not about the Hebrew, but the other stuff. I think of prepositions as just idiomatic almost by definition now.