Hello, I just registered here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Belly T  Can I asked this:
The refugees continued to feel unsafe until they had crossed the border.
So how can we rewrite it with "Not until"? |
If you say
"The refugees continued to feel unsafe until they had crossed the border",
wouldn't it mean this -- The refugees felt
unsafe before crossing the border. After they had crossed the border, they felt
safe.
Now, we rewrite it with "not until":
"Not until they had crossed the border did the refugees (begin to) feel safe" -- as opposed to feeling unsafe. For the meaning to stay the same, we had to change unsafe to safe.
In other words, "Until" means "from the past to point X", whereas "not until" means "from point X to the future".
I found this forum when I searched for "not until" and its usage, because I wanted to find out how to complete a sentence in an English exercise. This is the sentence:
"
Y he'd got an official warning which had stated quite clearly that..." etc. Y has to have the meaning of "Not until last summer".
But am I right that you can't just say "Not until last summer
he'd got an official warning..." because the word order would break? It should be "not until last summer
had he got". But I can't change that. So correct me if I'm wrong, but does it go like this:
"It was not until last summer that he'd got an official warning...". If we put a subject "It" in the beginning, we can use direct word order in the subordinate clause, right? Without "It" there would be only one subject, "He", and because of that only one clause, which would have to have an inverse word order (correct term?) because of the "not until" in the beginning.
Additionally, when I registered here, I got this message:
"Until you have activated your account, you will not be able to post messages in these forums."
How would you change that into "not until"? :D