Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

How did « histoire », in « histoire de/que », semantically shift to signify "in order to/that"?

+1
−0

This French StackExchange post merely paraprhased "histoire de/que" as afin de / afin que, meaning pour / pour que — all this can be translated as "in order to/that" in English. But nobody in fact mooted, let alone, expatiate the etymology of "histoire de/que"!

histoire itself entered English as history, but I see nothing in its etymology that semantically appertains to "in order to/that"? So what semantic notions underlie « histoire de/que », with "in order to/that"?

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

0 comment threads

1 answer

+2
−0

(I will suppose that the connection of French "histoire" to English "story" is rather clear, except that the English word is closer in its meaning to a "story as it is told", whereas the French one is a little bit closer to "events as they have happened", or "events as they are canonically told".)

"Histoire que" means "just on order that", or "only in order that". It is used when you want to downplay the need to explain whatever precedes "histoire que", rather than provide a boring, strong, rational purpose for it. You could even use it nearly tautologically, similar to "I replied just in order to say anything", which in reality means "Never mind what and why I said exactly, I just wanted to keep the conversation going."

Dominique Legallois, in his article "Le connecteur histoire (de) au regard de ses occurrences dans Frantext" (Syntaxe et Sémantique, 2007, 8, p.61-74) hypothesizes that the origin of the phrase might have originated from a fixed phrase "l'historie de rire", first meaning "[to make a] story to laugh about", and later "just so that we can have some fun", or perhaps a little more literally "in order to have a story we can laugh about". (I can't guarantee that my presentation of his findings is accurate, I haven't read the article in entirety.)

Note that "rire", in this phrase, is the infinitive form. If we assume, along with Legallois, that people started to substitute different verbs for "rire", sometimes the infinitive just wasn't flexible enough for what they wanted to say. They may have wanted to express the grammatical subject, or tense, or whatever, as well. If this is true, they'd be forced to evolve "histoire de" into "histoire que" for purely grammatical reasons: to be able to continue with a more flexible definite verb form.

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

Many thanks! How did you happen upon Dominique Legallois's article? Google? (2 comments)

Sign up to answer this question »