# Development of Single vs. Double vs. Multiple Negation



## grubble

Hello
In English a double negative makes a positive.  "I didn't not go" = "I did go"
In many Romance languages, Spanish for example, a double negative makes an even greater negative.

I have had this explained with an arithmetical metaphor:

-1 x -1 = 1  (English)
-1 + -1 = -2 (Spanish)

We also see it sometimes in English dialect. e.g. "I haven't got no money" = "I haven't got any money."

Latin gave rise to Spanish and yet Latin is like English in using the 'multiplication' method.

My question is, does anyone know how such a difference can and does evolve? If it happens gradually then we have the situation where a change in the rules about which side of the road to drive on will cause multiple crashes if introduced gradually.

Note - This discussion started on the Spanish-English forum http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2213446


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## duvija

grubble said:


> Hello
> In English a double negative makes a positive. "I didn't not go" = "I did go"
> In many Romance languages, Spanish for example, a double negative makes an even greater negative.
> 
> I have had this explained with an arithmetical metaphor:
> 
> -1 x -1 = 1 (English)
> -1 + -1 = -2 (Spanish)
> 
> We also see it sometimes in English dialect. e.g. "I haven't got no money" = "I haven't got any money."
> 
> Latin gave rise to Spanish and yet Latin is like English in using the 'multiplication' method.
> 
> My question is, does anyone know how such a difference can and does evolve? If it happens gradually then we have the situation where a change in the rules about which side of the road to drive on will cause multiple crashes if introduced gradually.
> 
> Note - This discussion started on the Spanish-English forum http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2213446



Not an answer to this one, but daughter languages are usually very different from their mother languages (sorry, it's normally known as mother/daughter. Only case where the feminine wins out as a neutral...)
Remember, Latin had declension, and so did the mother of the Germanic languages (with Eng. as a daughter) but none of the Latin daughters went down that road.


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## clevermizo

grubble said:


> Hello
> In English a double negative makes a positive.  "I didn't not go" = "I did go"
> In many Romance languages, Spanish for example, a double negative makes an even greater negative.



You should read the wiki on the Jespersen's cycle. 

It's a theoretical framework in which we explain changes in negation patterns by the rise and fall or innovation or loss of negation particles. Think about French. In standard French , "I know nothing" is "Je ne sais rien."

You can see that the verb is negated "Je ne sais..." and furthermore another negative word is used "rien."

However, colloquially, this is abbreviated to "Je (n')sais rien." If the standard language lost the "ne" particle entirely and "Je sais rien" became the standard, then you would no longer have a "double negation system." In the case of French, the vowel in _ne_ is a schwa which in general is prone to be elided, and furthermore, the subject pronoun is obligatory.

A similar process by the way occurred in English, were we had a "X ne Y nawiht" sandwich and subsequently the "ne" particle was lost leaving "X Y nawiht" as "He goes not." This was eventually supplanted with "He does not go" but the point remains that we lost a particle through an abbreviate form which lead to the apparent loss in "double negation."

However, despite this, English dialects have either maintained or innovated new double negation. So it seems to be a cyclical process   where languages go through different patterns throughout their history. Where negation particles are lost, new ones are innovated, then the new ones are lost and other ones are innovated again.

Arabic has undergone this too! Especially colloquially. Many Arabic dialects have gone through a phase where negation was expressed with multiple particles. For example:

Mā ruħt š(i): I didn't go (lit. NO (i have gone) (NOT) A THING) where "š(i)" meaning "a thing" became an emphatic negation particle like the French pas. But similarly, I have never gone: Mā ruħt abadan (NO (i have gone) NEVER)).

But now in modern varieties of Palestinian Arabic, the mā negation particle is lost leaving just : Ruħt(e)š! So, we've gone from a double negation to a single negation system with respect to those particles. However currently in Arabic this is unstable so throughout Israel/Palestinian Territories you can hear all variations:

Mā ruħet  (single negation)
Mā ruħt-eš (double negation)
Ruħt-eš (single negation)

We can imagine that other languages went through similar stages where all varieties coexisted until one became considered standard. Not that those other varieties necessarily ever went away entirely and may still be represented by non-standard speech.

And to be honest, the explanation that "two negatives make a positive" in English is sort of an explanation after-the-fact. No one would hear the sentence "I ain't seen nothing" and interpret it to mean "I saw something." We rarely employ the "two negatives making a positive" principle in our own speech because it often leads to strange or awkward constructions. However some are quite common - "I don't disagree", etc. However if we hear "I don't see no people here" again, we would not interpret this to mean "I see some people here". We would only interpret this as "I don't see any people here" though it might be marked as "incorrect" speech. But this is important because the speaker of English still hears this as a negative construction, not a positive one, regardless of how one considers its correctness.


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## DenisBiH

An interesting thread. I was just listening to an audio lesson of a modern Hebrew course the other day when I noticed that they seem to have it too (double negative). I'm not sure about other Slavic languages, but in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian double negative is the norm as well, however I don't think it makes it "an even greater negative", simply negative.

I haven't got any money. - *Ne*mam *ni*šta para/novaca. (lit. "I haven't got no money")
I haven't seen anybody there. - *Ni*sam *ni*koga tamo vidio. (lit. "I haven't seen nobody there")
Don't go anywhere! - *Ni*gdje *ne* idi! (lit. "Don't go nowhere!")

It can actually be multiple rather than double negative:
Nobody was ever at the office. - *Ni*kad *ni*ko* ni*je bio u uredu. (lit. "Nobody wasn't never at the office")

However, there is no doubling of negative in "I didn't go" - *Ni*sam otišao.


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## clevermizo

DenisBiH said:


> ]
> I haven't got any money. - *Ne*mam *ni*šta para. (lit. "I haven't got no money")
> I haven't seen anybody there. - *Ni*sam *ni*koga tamo vidio. (lit. "I haven't seen nobody there")
> Don't go anywhere! - *Ni*gdje *ne* idi! (lit. "Don't go nowhere!")
> Nobody was at the office. - *Ni*ko *ni*je bio u uredu. (lit. "Nobody wasn't at the office")



Very nice. And I would point out here that _all_ of those English sentences, although they may be perceived as incorrect, would only truly be understood by native speakers as _negatives_ and not _two-negatives-making-a-positive_. So we could easily envision an alternate universe in which "Don't go nowhere" was standard and "Don't go anywhere" was non-standard, although in our case it's currently the other way around.


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## duvija

The old 'Jespersen cycle' ! I have an article published about this and negation in Spanish (in a book that's not uploaded to the web, of course...). I was using the example of 'en mi vida' as an NPI...

It also works for insults. First strong, then weakened, then a stronger one shows up.


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## Scholiast

Greetings, everyone.

This is all fascinating. There is a curious phenomenon in classical Greek which is worth mentioning in this context (and I'd love to know from someone more expert than I how it fits in with the "Jesperson cycle" - if it does at all). From the simple Greek negatives οὐ [_ou_] and μή [_mē_] are formed the compounds οὐδείς/μηδείς [_oudeis_/_mēdeis_, "no-one"], οὐδέποτε/μηδέποτε [_oudepote_/_mēdepote_, "never"], οὐδαμῶς/μηδαμῶς [_oudamōs_/_mēdamōs_, "in no way"] and several others.

The curiosity is (at least this is what I was taught) that if a compounded negative precedes a simple, the double negation becomes an emphatic positive assertion, thus,

οὐδείς οὐχ ἁμαρτάνει [_oudeis ouch hamartanei_]

means "No-one does not make mistakes", i.e. "Everyone makes mistakes";

whereas the other way about, the accumulated negatives reinforce each other:

οὐχ ἁμαρτάνει οὐδείς οὐδέποτε [_ouch hamartanei oudeis oudepote_]

means, emphatically, "*No-one ever* makes mistakes" (tantamount to colloquial English - as grubble #1 already says - "No-one don't never make mistakes")

Can anyone please shed any light on this?


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## berndf

Most if not all languages had the reinforcing double-negative at some point in there history. Even languages having abolished in in standard language retained it in dialectal speech, e.g. like English or German.

I suspect that the elimination of the reinforcing double-negative in favour if the the neutralizing double-negative is the due to influence of learned language upon standard language. The need for disambiguation clearly exists in academic language. Imagine sentences like "No non-empty set has a cardinality less than 1" would be ambiguous.


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## artion

Scholiast said:


> There is a curious phenomenon in classical Greek  From the simple Greek negatives οὐ [_ou_] and μή [_mē_] are formed the compounds οὐδείς/μηδείς [_oudeis_/_mēdeis_, "no-one"], οὐδέποτε/μηδέποτε [_oudepote_/_mēdepote_, "never"], οὐδαμῶς/μηδαμῶς [_oudamōs_/_mēdamōs_, "in no way"] and several others.
> The curiosity is (at least this is what I was taught) that if a compounded negative precedes a simple, the double negation becomes an emphatic positive assertion, thus,
> οὐδείς οὐχ ἁμαρτάνει [_oudeis ouch hamartanei_]  means "No-one does not make mistakes", i.e. "Everyone makes mistakes";


It seems that in modern Gr. this doesn't apply. The equivalent phrase "Kaneis den amartanei" means "Nobody makes mistakes". Generally, in modern Gr. a double negation  usually means negation (with some emphasis), e.g.
_Den eho kanenan adelfo _= I haven't got any brother.
_Den eho adelfo _= I have no brother. 
The real trouble is how to answer a negative question in Greek. A simple "yes" or "no" may be confusing and usually more words (or gestures) are needed. 
- Didn't you go? 
- No (I didn't)
A simple "yes" is not readily understood "I went", but a special gesture with the head (and no word) can give the message "yes, I went".


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## DenisBiH

berndf said:


> Imagine sentences like "No non-empty set has a cardinality less than 1" would be ambiguous.



Hm,

_*Ni*jedan neprazan skup *ne*ma kardinalnost manju od 1._ lit. "Not one non-empty set doesn't have cardinality less than 1"

But it could also be rephrased as:

_Ne postoji nijedan neprazan skup koji ima kardinalnost manju od 1._ - lit. "(There) doesn't exist not one non-empty set that has cardinality less than 1"
_Ne postoji nijedan neprazan skup sa kardinalnošću manjom od 1._ - lit. "(There) doesn't exist not one non-empty set with cardinality less than 1"

It isn't ambiguous, really.  The only potential ambiguity that I see would be from "non-empty" (neprazan) but that's not double negative, it's simply an adjective like any other.


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## berndf

In cases where double negation is mandatory, like _ne... rien_ in standard French, there is no ambiguity. Hence there is not need to drop it.


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## DenisBiH

berndf said:


> In cases where double negation is mandatory, like _ne... rien_ in standard French, there is no ambiguity. Hence there is not need to drop it.



Ah sorry, I should have read your post more carefully ("reinforcing"). So we need to distinguish between a reinforcing double negative and a mandatory double negative. In our (BCS) case:

_Nijedan neprazan skup ima kardinalnost manju od 1._ (without the double negative)

...would simply be incorrect.


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## francisgranada

artion said:


> ... The real trouble is how to answer a negative question in Greek. A simple "yes" or "no" may be confusing and usually more words (or gestures) are needed.
> - Didn't you go?
> - No (I didn't)
> A simple "yes" is not readily understood "I went", but a special gesture with the head (and no word) can give the message "yes, I went".



In Hungarian:

- Mentél? _(Did you go?)_
- Nem (_no, I didn't go_)
- Igen (_yes, I went_) 

- Nem mentél? (_Didn't you go?) _
- Nem (_no, I didn't go_)
- De _("but yes",  I went_)

****************
The double negation works in Hungarian as well, and it's obligatory:

Nem tudok semmit (_litterally: I don't know nothing_)

The "single" negation has an other meaning:

Nem tudok valamit _(litterally: I don't know something, i.e. there is something I do not know, but not anything at all)_
Tudok semmit (_litterally: I know nothing, but this construction is not used, perhaps because "the nothing" cannot be known...)_


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## clevermizo

duvija said:


> The old 'Jespersen cycle' ! I have an article published about this and negation in Spanish (in a book that's not uploaded to the web, of course...). I was using the example of 'en mi vida' as an NPI...
> 
> It also works for insults. First strong, then weakened, then a stronger one shows up.



Interestingly in Spanish, I would think the double negative is reinforced by the fact that Spanish is pro-drop. So for example in French you can have colloquially: Je ne sais pas > Jen sais pas > Je sais pas and thereby lose the double negation.

However in Spanish, although you could envision: Yo no sé nada > *Yon sé nada > *Yo sé nada, I think the double negation is reinforced by the fact that using "Yo" would be emphatic and unnecessary. So you have "No sé nada" which is harder to abbreviate because the "no" particle isn't sandwiched between two other words. 

What do you think of that?

The counterexample is of course Palestinian Arabic dialects which are also pro-drop however have had no problem losing its double negation: Mā baħibbeš > baħibbeš.


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## francisgranada

When did the words "rien" and "nada" start to have the meaning of "nothing"?

I ask this question, because etymologically, "je ne sais rien" and "yo no sé nada" are not double negations: r_ien _comes from the Latin _rem _(< res) and _nada_ probably from the Latin_ nata _(< res nata < rem natam?). Thus,  "je ne sais rien" could have meant litterally "I not know thing".


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## clevermizo

francisgranada said:


> When did the words "rien" and "nada" start to have the meaning of "nothing"?
> 
> I ask this question, because etymologically, "je ne sais rien" and "yo no sé nada" are not double negations: r_ien _comes from the Latin _rem _(< res) and _nada_ probably from the Latin_ nata _(< res nata < rem natam?). Thus,  "je ne sais rien" could have meant litterally "I not know thing".



Probably as soon as they started getting used commonly in negative constructions.  Similarly in Arabic mā baħibb š means "I don't love *a thing*" etymologically, but now those dialects, because of the negative construction, -š has lost the meaning of being "a thing" and now only means negation, and they have evolved other words to mean "a thing." 

Similarly, _personne_ has acquired the meaning of "no one" in French in certain usages, I believe. Again, being used regularly in negative constructions has meant reinforcing a negative quality for those words.


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## berndf

clevermizo said:


> Similarly, _personne_ has acquired the meaning of "no one" in French in certain usages, I believe. Again, being used regularly in negative constructions has meant reinforcing a negative quality for those words.


In standard language _personne_ and _plus _don't have negative meaning. Just in colloquial speech where _ne_ is dropped the ambiguity arises. In the case of plus the meanings are distinguished by pronunciation: /plys/ means _more_ and /ply/ means _no more_ (J'ai plu*s* d'argent - j'ai plus d'argent).


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## Outsider

Double negatives can have a reinforced negative sense in languages where the double negative is standard. I've noticed this in Portuguese, in accidental nonstandard constructs that use double or triple negatives where only one is required. This could be a way that double negatives arise: initially a form of emphasis, which later becomes standard. As Clevermizo has noted, outside of technical language a string of negatives would seldom be interpreted as anything but another negative, anyway.

I think _personne_ can indeed mean "nobody" in standard French, though I'm not completely sure. For example:

-- Qui est allé à la plage ?
-- Personne.

"Who went to the beach?"
"Nobody."

Either way, in Portuguese _jamais_ can mean both "never" and "ever". Discussion here.


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## DenisBiH

Somehow the French double negative and the Palestinian dialectal double negative do not seem quite the same thing as what we have in Bosnian / BCS. Here the negation does not mean using two words that both convey the negative meaning, whatever their etymology, but consists of negating certain pronouns/adverbs/adjectives:

ko "who" - iko "anybody" - *niko* pron. "nobody"
_Niko to ne zna._ "Nobody knows that".
šta "what" - išta "anything" - *ništa* pron. "nothing"
_Ništa ne razumijem._ "I don't understand anything".
kada "when " - ikada "ever" - *nikada* adv. "never"
_Nikada više neću to uraditi._ "I won't do that ever again".
gdje "where" - igdje "anywhere" - *nigdje* "nowhere"
_Nigdje ne vidim tvoj potpis._ "I don't see your signature anywhere".
kako "how" - ikako "in any way" - *nikako* adv. "in no way"
_Nikako ne mogu da nađem vremena za odmor._ "I can't find the time for r&r in any way (-> no matter what I do)"
jedan "one" - ijedan "at least one" - *nijedan* adj. "not one; none"
_Nijedan ti izgovor neće sada pomoći._ "No excuse will help you now".

...and some others. 

So in the case the sentence needs to be put into negative, we simply take these negative forms, and it need not be restricted to a double negative, in fact one must apply the negation to all such forms in a sentence:

_Nikada niko ništa nije postigao ležeći u krevetu po cijeli dan._
"Nobody has ever accomplished anything by lying in bed all day long".
lit. "Nobody hasn't never accomplished nothing by lying in bed all day long".


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## Outsider

Is _ne_ a negative particle? I mean, can _niko to ne zna_, for instance, be parsed as "nobody doesn't know that"?... This would be equivalent to standard French _personne ne sait cela_ (assuming we treat _personne_ as negative, which is debatable, but there are clearer examples in other Romance languages).


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## DenisBiH

Outsider said:


> Is _ne_ a negative particle? I mean, can _Niko to ne zna_, for instance, be parsed as "nobody doesn't know that"_?_



Yes, _ne_ means "no; not". And also yes for the parsing.


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## francisgranada

Outsider said:


> ..._niko to ne zna ..._



Litterally: 
_*ni*ko to *ne* zna = _ _*no*_body it *not* knows


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## DenisBiH

francisgranada said:


> Litterally:
> _*ni*ko to *ne* zna = _ _*no*_body it that *not* knows



ȏn, òna, òno - he, she, it
òvāj, òvā, òvō - this
tȃj, tȃ, tȏ - that (for short to intermediate distances)
ònāj, ònā, ònō - "that one over there" (farther away)

Sorry for the off-topic.


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## francisgranada

Then let's be even more precise : 

Litterally:
_*ni*ko _to _*ne* _zna _= _ _*no*who_ that *not* knows


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## DenisBiH

francisgranada said:


> Then let's be even more precise :
> 
> Litterally:
> _*ni*ko _to _*ne* _zna _= _ _*no*who_ that *not* knows



Well, if you insist.  But to get back on-topic, now I'm curious if Hungarian has multiple negatives of a similar kind? How would you translate the sentence below to Hungarian?

"Nobody has ever accomplished anything by lying in bed all day long".


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## Scholiast

Greetings!

I know not if this helps, but in Alsace I have heard:

"Dös het er nie jamais g'sait' - "He never said that".


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## francisgranada

DenisBiH said:


> ... would you translate the sentence below to Hungarian?
> "Nobody has ever accomplished anything by lying in bed all day long".



*Sen*ki *nem *teljesített *soha sem*mit ... _litt_.: *No*body *not *accomplished *never  no*thing _..._

By the way, there is an interesting construction in Hungarian, where the double negation does not occur:

Mit *sem *tudok (litt. What neigther I-know) 
instead of the usual:
*Nem *tudok *sem*mit (litt. Not I-know nothing)

Both the sentences mean "I don't know anything" (there is a stylistical difference between them)


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## DenisBiH

francisgranada said:


> *Sen*ki *nem *teljesített *soha sem*mit ... _litt_.: *No*body *not *accomplished *never  no*thing _..._
> 
> By the way, there is an interesting construction in Hungarian, where the double negation does not occur:
> 
> Mit *sem *tudok (litt. What neigther I-know)
> instead of the usual:
> *Nem *tudok *sem*mit (litt. Not I-know nothing)
> 
> Both the sentences mean "I don't know anything" (there is a stylistical difference between them)



Thanks! 

I don't know of any such constructs like _Mit sem tudok_ here, but _niti_ "neither; nor" does not cause negation.

_Niti iko išta zna, niti je ikoga briga._ 
"Neither does anyone know anything, nor does anyone care"
lit "Neither anyone anything knows, nor is of anyone concern"


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## francisgranada

DenisBiH said:


> ... I don't know of any such constructs like _Mit sem tudok_ here, but _niti_ "neither; nor" does not cause negation ...



Of course, but this is not a standard construction with "neihter". It's rather a "decomposition" of the word *semmit *(_nothing _in accusative) into its elemnts *sem *and *mit*: instead of _semmit _we have _mit sem _in inversed order, but maintaining the meaning of "nothing". As if instead of  "_Ništa ne znam" _we should say_ "Šta ni znam". 

_But etymologically, even the proper word _sem _is a composition of _se_+_nem _(nor+not), so the frase "Mit sem tudok" implicitely contains the negation (but only once).  

(the English _neihter/nor_ does not always correspond to the Hungarian _se_, _sem_.)


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## clevermizo

Outsider said:


> I think _personne_ can indeed mean "nobody" in standard French, though I'm not completely sure. For example:
> 
> -- Qui est allé à la plage ?
> -- Personne.



Yes this is what I was talking about. This is standard usage isn't it? I didn't think this was strictly colloquial.



> Either way, in Portuguese _jamais_ can mean both "never" and "ever". Discussion here.



Similarly with Spanish jamás. 

Arabic _abadan_ also can also be either "ever" or "never" in the standard language, however in colloquial dialects it almost always means "never".


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## Ghabi

And of course people mean "don't worry" when they say _t'inquiète_. In Cantonese we say 無時無刻 "no hours no quarters" when we mean "all the time". Anomalies? I don't think so. That only shows that we should not apply our Logic ABC to Language, who doesn't give a monkey's about the former.


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## duvija

Well, people working on Negation learnt a long while ago that you shouldn't mix 'formal logic' with Language logic, and also that the logic of one language doesn't translate into another. 'Double negatives' are not excluded from this.

A couple'o details:
In Spanish, 'jamás' all by itself, is a negative. But, usually, it comes together with 'nunca' as in 'nunca jamás', which is just a very strong negation. The problem is that you can use 'jamás' in positive sentences 'el niño más lindo que he visto jamás', and that's a PPI (positive polarity item, as opossed to the previous one, when it was a NPI - Negative Polarity item). In this case, it works as 'ever'.

About negative questions, stick with Japanese. They don't happen in Indo-European (I believe. Any counter-example? Please...)

Didn't French, in some areas of France, totally lose the 'ne' and kept the 'pas' all by itself? (I mean, not only the 'rien' but the 'pas').

And now... I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh, well.


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## Ghabi

duvija said:


> Well, people working on Negation learnt a long while ago that you shouldn't mix 'formal logic' with Language logic, and also that the logic of one language doesn't translate into another. 'Double negatives' are not excluded from this.


Of course you're right, Duvija! But that's a pet peeve of mine. Many people really get a kick out of saying "double negative" is "illogical", and I just can't stand it. Perhaps it's just me.


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## clevermizo

duvija said:


> Didn't French, in some areas of France, totally lose the 'ne' and kept the 'pas' all by itself? (I mean, not only the 'rien' but the 'pas').



This is the common colloquial form _Je sais pas_ instead of _Je ne sais pas_. I used _rien_ in examples above just because it's easier to directly translate _rien_ into English than _pas_.


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## duvija

clevermizo said:


> This is the common colloquial form _Je sais pas_ instead of _Je ne sais pas_. I used _rien_ in examples above just because it's easier to directly translate _rien_ into English than _pas_.



Oh, ok, thanks. I thought I was crazy...


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## Outsider

clevermizo said:


> -- Qui est allé à la plage ?
> -- Personne.
> 
> 
> 
> Yes this is what I was talking about. This is standard usage isn't it? I didn't think this was strictly colloquial.
Click to expand...

I suppose _personne_ here could be regarded as elliptic, _personne_ [_n'est allé à la plage_], with the negation implied. Nevertheless, it's quite standard to just reply _personne_, as far as I know.

Thinking about it a little more, I guess _personne_ is generally understood as "person" when it's a noun (_la personne_), and as "nobody" ("no person") when it's a pronoun.


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## grubble

While we are on the subject of ellipsis (I've just learned a new term!), it seems that omission of the negative goes hand-in-hand with the double negative.

Example

*English: Did you like it? Absolutely!  * (Yes I loved it!)



*Spanish: ¿te gustó? !en absoluto!*  (No I hated it!)


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## berndf

clevermizo said:


> -- Qui est allé à la plage ?
> -- Personne.
> 
> 
> 
> Yes this is what I was talking about. This is standard usage isn't it? I didn't think this was strictly colloquial.
Click to expand...

In standard language you aren't supposed to answer with a single word and by doing so you enter the realm of colloquial language. So, the question doesn't arise.


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## duvija

It was also part of my paper. The problem with 'absoluto' comes when someone answers 'absolutamente', in which case we don't know what they meant. And in a bilingual situation, it's tough.


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> In standard language you aren't supposed to answer with a single word and by doing so you enter the realm of colloquial language.


According to which authority? The Académie?...


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## berndf

That's what I learned in grammar school.


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## Outsider

While studying French, or German?


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> While studying French, or German?


Both. Of course I can't tell if my teachers didn't confuse the two.


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## Outsider

OK. Thank you for the clarification.


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## terredepomme

Not just "personne" or "plus," all French words associated "ne" originally do not bear a negative sense. "Il n'y a goutte" (there's not a drop) "Elle n'en dit mot" (She does not say a word about it) etc. To my knowledge, the negating words "point" and "pas" originally had the literal sense of "dot" and "step(footprint)" as well. It is just that the word "ne" was considered too weak for a negation, and these auxiliary words assumed its negating role, at least in colloquial speech.


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## CapnPrep

francisgranada said:


> When did the words "rien" and "nada" start to have the meaning of "nothing"?


 For _rien_, Grevisse (§761, c) says from the 14th century onwards, but the TLF has examples going back much earlier, like these lines from _Eneas_ (2531f):Estez, iluec *por rien* venez
car ja par mei n'i passerez​It's the same in modern French: _Vous êtes venu pour *rien*_ ("You came for nothing"), which is not equivalent to _Vous *n'*êtes venu pour *rien*_ ("You didn't come for anything").

Contrary to what berndf said above (#17 and #38), _personne_ can also have a negative meaning on its own without _ne_, in a complete, non-elliptical sentence of fully standard French, although this happens more rarely than with _rien_:Certains travaux des sciences […] présentent une telle limpidité de leur armature qu’on les dirait l’œuvre de *personne* (P. Valéry, cited in Grevisse §1028, c)​


terredepomme said:


> Not just "personne" or "plus," all French words associated "ne" originally do not bear a negative sense.


Not true, of course, for _nul_ (_nullement_, _nulle part_, …).


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## tFighterPilot

In Hebrew the word כלום klum originally meant "thing"\"something", but since it has always been preceded by negation (Ein Klum - There is no thing - There's nothing) its original meaning was almost forgotten and is sometimes used without the negation and by itself means "nothing". Kind of a 1 = -1 x 1 = -1

A similar word is שום shum, which original meaning can be translated to "some" but for the same reasons now means "no" in the meaning of quantity. It can be connected with the former to Shum Klum which to less knowledgeable Hebrew speakers would seem like -1 x -1 = -1 but is really 1 x 1 = -1


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> Contrary to what berndf said above (#17 and #38), _personne_ can also have a negative meaning on its own without _ne_, in a complete, non-elliptical sentence of fully standard French, although this happens more rarely than with _rien_:Certains travaux des sciences […] présentent une telle limpidité de leur armature qu’on les dirait l’œuvre de *personne* (P. Valéry, cited in Grevisse §1028, c)​


True. "Personne" isn't a verb complement (subject, object or predicative noun) here but attributes another noun. Hence, there is no place for a "ne".


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## grubble

Outsider said:


> I've just remembered the intriguing construct in English sentences such as the saying "All that glitters is not gold". On the surface, this is a straightforward (simple) negative, but as a matter of fact its ordinary meaning is "*Not all* that glitters is gold" (some of what glitters _is_ gold). Not exactly the same, but there are similarities...


It's interesting because, in this case, the verb "to be" is employed the sense "to be equivalent to". The equivalence operator is bidirectional.

Conclusion:

The sentence  "All that glitters is not gold"

 means

All-that-glitters is not equivalent to gold 

 or

Gold  is not the same thing as All-that-glitters.


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## duvija

Outsider said:
			
		

> I've just remembered the intriguing construct in English sentences such as the saying "All that glitters is not gold". On the surface, this is a straightforward (simple) negative, but as a matter of fact its ordinary meaning is "*Not all* that glitters is gold" (some of what glitters _is_ gold). Not exactly the same, but there are similarities...






grubble said:


> It's interesting because, in this case, the verb "to be" is employed the sense "to be equivalent to". The equivalence operator is bidirectional.
> 
> Conclusion:
> The sentence "All that glitters is not gold"
> means
> All-that-glitters is not equivalent to gold
> or
> Gold is not the same thing as All-that-glitters.



Little detail: there are two different readings for that idiom.
1) thinks may look like gold but aren't
2) thinks that glitter are pretty, so we don't need them to be gold. 
(I always understood it with the meaning of 2) )

Now, the complications came from some articles in psychology, claiming that those readings correspond to different personalities. The 2) corresponds to people with clinical depression. 
I found that strange because 2) seems to be more generous and optimistic than 1), doesn't it?
Well, there you go.


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## Ghabi

grubble said:


> The sentence  "All that glitters is not gold"
> means
> All-that-glitters is not equivalent to gold
> or
> Gold  is not the same thing as All-that-glitters.



I wonder if such an equation has ever occurred to a speaker's mind. I think when one learns an expression or an idiom, one learns it as a whole, not as a Boolean function. Well, unless one's learning Lojban. It's just like what's said in an earlier post:



clevermizo said:


> And to be honest, the explanation that "two negatives makes a positive"  in English is sort of an explanation after-the-fact. No one would hear  the sentence "I ain't seen nothing" and interpret it to mean "I saw  something."



There's no "double negatives" in the first place, is there?


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## bo-marco

Gallo-Italic languages, spoken in north of Italy, use Jespersen's cycle too (_stage II_, like french).

example in emilian.
a dig (I say/je dis)
a *n* dig *minga *(i do not say/je ne dis pas)
a *n* dig *gnint *(lit. i do not say nothing/je ne dis rien)


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