NeantHumain wrote:
Hodor wrote:
Sorry to derail the thread, but other major languages do use double negatives. Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Russian, Serbian and Polish can all use multiple negatives in one sentence, and so does French with 'je ne mange rien' (literally: I don't eat nothing.) Even in English, the double negative used to be quite common in English, even in literature.
Sorry, but in contemporary French,
ne is just a clitic with little semantic weight; the negation really rests with
rien. Originally,
ne carried the semantic meaning of negation, and words like
pas,
point, etc. were added for emphasis ("I don't have any cake," vs. "I don't have
one crumb of cake"). Now that the negation rests with what were once emphatic particles, the
ne is disappearing from informal speech as redundant.
Okay, fair enough. I guess ne...pas and ne...rien aren't true double negatives. At least in Hungarian, though, double negatives are actually sometimes
required (unfortunately I can't cite any examples because I don't know Hungarian.)
NeantHumain wrote:
Hodor wrote:
Mw99 wrote:
Quote:
Even in English, the double negative used to be quite common in English, even in literature.
"I didn't do nothing."

Quite so. I should have said that the double negative is still alive and kicking. Ain't nobody gonna take no double negative away from us.
Yeah, but who says that? The double negative remains only in a few socioliguistically stigmatized dialects like Ebonics and blue-collar speech.
Maybe the use of the double negative is more common in Britain than in other English-speaking countries. Many, many dialects in the UK still frequently use the double negative, including some well-known dialects, notably Cockney. Where I was brought up, in rural South Wales, it's also very common.
I have a suspicion that double negatives were only discouraged because Latin doesn't use them. The mindset of the 18th century grammarians was that Latin was among the highest and most ordered of the world's languages, so therefore other languages should follow their examples from Latin. This is why split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences were rewarded with a slap on the wrist.
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