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From: knudsen@ihnss.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Ree: Double negatives, and Russian
Message-ID: <1619@ihnss.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Jul-83 13:43:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihnss.1619
Posted: Fri Jul 22 13:43:32 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Jul-83 05:16:56 EDT
Organization: BTL Naperville, Il.
Lines: 15

Double negatives are not confined to creole, pidgin, or whatever.
My college Russian teacher empgasized that Russian uses double, triple,
or more negatives as desired for increased emphasis --
"the more neg's you put in, the negativer it gets."
In my own jargon, I would ssay the Russians prefer the "analog"
interpretation of negatives (more is more) to our formal "digital"
scheme (truth = even parity over # of negatives).

Who the hell wants to compute parities in their heads in realtime?
I HATE sentences in Enlgish like "...this criticism was not undeserved"
or even "...it is unlikely that this criticism was not undeserved"
(yes, I really saw that TRIPLE job recently in a book review)..
Don't like to have to stop and count on my fingers to know whose
side that author was on....
	mike k