I just overheard a conversation between two foreign students and one of them was complaining abot something like this: "I attend every single class while my classmates skip whole days and dare I not share my notes with them , I suddenely become the meanest person in the world."
I'm not sure if I caught it properly, but this dare I not thing got me thinking. Is this correct grammatically? Or how else would you put it? Thanks in advance! :)
This sounds to contemporary ears like archaic English.
The usual way of expressing this would be
and if I dare to not share my notes with them, I suddenly become the meanest person in the world.
In Early Modern English grammar, you could use inversion instead of an if clause to create a counterfactual.
I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.
In contemporary English, this would be
I could not love you, dear, so much, if I didn't love honor more.
We still use inversion instead of if clauses for past tense modals and auxiliary verbs:
I could have borne the shade, had I not seen the sun.
We don't use inversion instead of if with present tense modals or non-counterfactual conditionals. So we don't say
*I will help you, can I find the time,
although
I would help you, could I find the time,
is grammatical (if a little old-fashioned sounding).
I don't believe people ever did this; I haven't found any use of inversion for non-counterfactual conditional clauses (although maybe I didn't look hard enough).
Here, dare is indeed a semi-modal. But it's not a past tense modal and this isn't a counterfactual conditional clause.
So I don't think this would have been grammatical in Early Modern English.
The object of the "dare", here, simply includes a negative possibility; it hasn't been grammatically changed in any way. The only real point of interest is the inversion of the verb and subject, "dare I" rather than "I dare", to give a conditional mood.
For instance, you could equate the negative expression to one that simply uses an embedded negative, such as "dare I refuse to lend him my notes", which would in turn equate to "if I dared (to) refuse to lend him my notes".
It doesn't sound particularly archaic to me, but I probably read more pre-modern English literature than most people.
