Double negation (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Double negation
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Serpent
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Message 33 of 36

30 September 2007 at 2:35am | IP Logged

epingchris wrote:

I think French's the same with Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.

In Mandarin, I think you can have as many negative as you want, as long as people can work out the logic (usually double, sometimes triple):
ni3 bu4 xi3 huan1 ta1? (You don't like her?)
wo3 mei2 you3 bu4 xi3 huan1 ta1 a! (I don't don't like her!)
ni3 cai2 bu2 huei4 mei2 you3 bu4 xi3 huan1 ta1 ne! (You don't don't don't like her!)

Which translates into:
-You don't like her?
-I don't DISLIKE her!
-It's impossible that you don't dislike her!(It's all written on your face......)

one can do almost the same in Russian with the verb ненавидеть (to hate) :)

Edited by Serpent on 30 September 2007 at 2:36am
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quendidil
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Message 34 of 36

09 October 2007 at 3:21am | IP Logged

I think the issue we're really tALking about here is whether in various languages a double negative works out to a positive or negative right? In that sense, from what I gather, the Romance languages and Slavic languages have a tendency for a double negative to work out to be a positive while in grammatically "correct" English a double negative works out to be a positive, as it logically should. The Chinese and Japanese work in similar ways.
～なければならない＝it is not becoming if (～) is negative= ～must come to pass

But anyway, for 几乎没有不知道的人 you could also say 几乎大家都知道 which is idiomatically correct without going into a double negative.
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Karakorum
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Message 35 of 36

10 October 2007 at 3:09am | IP Logged

HTale wrote:

In alot of Arabic dialects, there is double negation:

MSA ("correct"): Wa maa faa'ala Ibrahim shaya'aa.
TRANSLATION: And Ibrahim did nothing.

Moroccan Arabic: Où ma daar 'brahim walou
TRANSLATION: And Ibrahim didn't do nothing.

Isn't shay'an supposed to mean "something"? I think MSA is pretty strict about single negation (but I am not really an expert). The sentence translates as: And not Ibrahim did something. I was even surprised to know that some Levantine dialects still keep the mathematical rules of polarity, using different words to answer positively for a negative or positive question (along the lines of si in French).

I think you're right about dialects though, Egyptian for example has double negation:
We Ibrahim ma-amal-shi Haagah
And Ibrahim not-did-not something.

I recall vaguely having read that the "incorrect" double negation in African American vernacular was a holdover from Wolof or Mende, so I guess this is a feature of Niger-Congo? I don't really know.

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Iversen
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Message 36 of 36

10 October 2007 at 9:17am | IP Logged

I just had a peek at the Dutch/Afrikaans thread over at the multilingual forum. That reminded me of the weird double negation in Afrikaans - the same word twice in one sentence:

pip wrote:

weet nie how om dit te sê in Afrikaans nie

Edited by Iversen on 10 October 2007 at 9:18am

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