Lombard/Negation

Lombard language course
Morphology of Lombard language

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Prepositions and prepositional locutions
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Pronominal and adverbial particles
Negation
Other constructions replacing the adverbs "easily" and "hardly"
Conjunctions and conjunctive locutions

The reference orthography for this page of Lombard course is New Lombard orthography

In modern Lombard the negation is always post-verbal (the only exceptions are the Bregaglia valley, some areas of Trentino and, in the recent past, some valleys of Canton Ticino and Ossola). This means that the negative particle must be placed always after the verb.

es.: mì parli minga = I don’t speak.

Negative forms

Negative sentences are those constructed with the negating adverb minga- or its dialectal variants or "nò". The construction of these sentences has been described in the module about the construction of the sentence while on the page Lombard/Adverbs#Negating adverbs are found the dialectal variants of the negating adverbs

Negative sentences are also those constructed with indefinite pronouns nagot or nothing - or its dialectal variants thereof - (nothing) and nissun - or dialect variants thereof - (no one, nobody).

Negating adverb/pronoun in lombard	Negating adverb/pronoun in English	Example	Translation
minga / nò	not	Mì el vedi minga	I don’t see him
mai	never	Mì l'hoo mai vist	I have never seen him
nanca	not even	Mì l'hoo nanca vist	i didn’t even seen him
nananmò	not…yet	Mì l'hoo nananmò vist	I havn’t seen him yet
pù	never…again	Mì l'hoo pu vist	I never seen him again
nagot / nient	nothing, not anything	Mì vedi nagot	I see nothing I don’t see anything
nissun	nobody/noone, not…anybody/anyone	Mì hoo vist nissun	I didn’t see anyone

For variants of negating adverbs of negation and of negating indefinite pronouns, go to see the Wiktionary in Lombard.

Use of the negative form

As will be described in the module about sentence construction, except for rare exceptions, negative particles (“minga” and “nò”) always occur after the verb. In compound tenses, they are placed between the auxiliary and the past participle (except for the negating pronouns i.e. nissun and negott, which are placed ''after the past participle).
- hoo minga podud, not hoo podud minga (in English I could not).
- l'hoo mai sentud, not l'hoo sentud mai (in English I have never seen it).

Preverbal negative form

Cases of pre-verbal negation can be found in ancient literature and in some Alpine dialects.

mi no l'hoo mai vist

Adjectives in negative form

The particle minga can also be used, if placed before the adjective, to make it negative.

bell → minga bell (in English: beautiful → not beautiful)