In short, "ne" is the negation word, but "pas" originally means "step" (or "a small step"). "Je ne mange pas." originally mean "I didn't eat a little". The form then evolve into standard way of expression negation.

This discussion leads me to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle.

Jespersen's Cycle describe the historical development of the expression of negation: from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker.

It's interesting to note that English underwent the similar transition (e.g. "I ate not today") but now it ended up back to the first stage.

It's similar to OneLook reverse lookup dictionary (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/). Supports query in both Chinese and English.

Two seemingly unrelated words may have shared origin.

Search through corpus for more proper usages.

lots of english grammar terms explained. nice website for reference.

<blockquote>Perhaps synonyms. Top synonyms for perhaps (other words for perhaps) are possibly, maybe and probably.</blockquote>

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