Is the negative in ゆめ人に洩らし給えそ implicit?


> ゆめ人に洩らし給えそ Never breathe a syllable of it to any one! (ＮＥＷ斎藤和英大辞典)

Is negative meaning here implied but not stated explicitly? ゆめ ＝ 必ず, そ = ぞ as
bound particle (it could be negative final particle そ, maybe, but that follows
renyoukei/mizenkei according to this
<http://kobun.weblio.jp/content/%E3%81%9D>）, 洩らす＋たまう in meireikei is positive,
honorific request.




First, re the question in the title: the negative isn't implicit, it is, as
user10429 suspects, in the final /so/ (it is _also_ implicit in the /yume/, of
course, since this is only used in negative sentences).

But if it is final /so/, why is the verb /tamae/ instead of the expected
/tamai/? There are a couple of possible explanations:

  1. The example in the dictionary is incorrect; it is not from real usage, and the person who wrote it didn't know how to use final /so/ properly
  2. The example in the dictionary represents some form of real usage, but that real usage (say, combination of final /so/ with the imperative form of the verb) was idiosyncratic to a particular time/place (say, early 20th-C pseudoclassical literary Japanese) and has been forgotten now
  3. The example in the dictionary is completely normal in terms of morphology; it is in fact the ren'yokei of /tamaeru/

Explanation (1) basically allows us to treat this example as an aberration. We
don't need to revise our understanding of how final /so/ works if this is
true. The difficulty is that we can never find positive evidence that
explanation (1) is true -- only ever-increasing amounts of evidence failing to
falsify it. (This is a standard philosophy of science issue, of course...)

Explanation (2) would be the most interesting. We could prove it by finding
other examples of this usage pattern, and this would expand our knowledge of
how final /so/ works. The example raised in comments, /osanago ni ataetamae
so/ is a possible avenue for this. I'll explain it below.

Explanation (3) seems very unlikely because, as broccoli forest's comment
quoted above notes, /tamaeru/ is (to simplify) a "humble-izer" and it would be
strange to include it in an imperative construction like this.

Now let's consider /osanago ni ataetamae so/. First of all, it should be noted
that this is the title of a translation by Okada Saburo of a short story by
Max and Alex Fischer, original title "On ne devrait faire aux enfants",
translated in English as "Unto these little ones" in the collection Estelle.
The title refers to a song by Massenat, lyrics Boyer, that plays a role in the
story. Here's the first stanza:

> On ne devrait faire aux enfants  
>  Nulle peine, même légère.  
>  Ils sont si doux, ces innocents,  
>  Suspendus au sein de leur mère!

For reference, here's the translation included in the English short story:

> Unto these little ones, one should not mete  
>  A grief, however slight,  
>  Cradled upon a mother's breast,  
>  They are so innocent, so sweet.

Now if you look again at /osanago ni ataetamae so/ you will see that it is in
a 5/7 poetic form:

> Osanago ni/ ataetamae so...

Clearly, /osanago ni ataetamae so/ is both title of the story and first few
lines of the song, just as in the original.

But reconsider that part of the song: It's not in the imperative mood. Not
"Don't mete a grief, however slight...", but "One should not mete a grief,
however slight..."

I am going to go out on a limb here and advance the hypothesis that Okada
intentionally used /-tamae so/ instead of /-tamai so/ because he wanted to
reproduce that not-quite-an-imperative feeling. Like, maybe his /-tamae/ is
the ren'yokei of some causative of /-tamau/, i.e. "Do not allow a grief to be
meted..." (although the standard way to do this would be to add the causative
bit to the main verb and leave /tamau/ alone, e.g. /ik.ase.tamae/ "let/cause
to go"). Maybe he's saying to hell with it and going full izenkei. I am not
aware of anything like this actually being a thing in pseudo-classical
Japanese in the early 20th century, but I can certainly believe that a
translator might experiment with such things even if it didn't stick.

If this is true, it would correspond to explanation (2), and it might make the
example sentence acceptable with a slightly indirect meaning: "One should
absolutely not breathe a word of this to anyone." The way to prove this
hypothesis would be to find other examples of Okada and ideally his peers
doing similar things. Even just tracking down Okada's translation and seeing
how the line works in context would be a start.

====

Anyway, this is all pretty abstract stuff... I am very curious about it now,
but I think as a basic answer, it would probably be best to summarize:

  1. The negativity is in the /so/ and implicit in the /yume/
  2. Setting aside the issue of whether the example is an error or not, one would certainly _expect_ to see it written /-tamai so/ instead of /-tamae so/.

