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From: dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Creole languages and double negatives
Message-ID: <1893@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Aug-83 11:20:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.1893
Posted: Fri Aug  5 11:20:30 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Aug-83 20:14:53 EDT
References: <780@sdchema.UUCP>
Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto
Lines: 35

Well, Donn, what about Portuguese? It requires the double negative
like Italian, but unlike your example it requires it whether the
pronoun is at the beginning or not:

	Maria nao viu ninguem
	Mary   ^  saw nobody

	Ninguem nao falou com Sergio
	Nobody   ^  spoke with Sergio

I agree that the use of the double negative in certain contexts carries
an intuitive (if not logical) negative value. Interestingly, Hebrew, which
is totally of different origin than the Indo-European languages, uses
the double negative (it must have it) with word such as "nothing", "no-one",
etc.:
	Lo ra'iti clum    (No I-saw nothing --> I didn't see anything)
	Af echad lo haya po ( one not was here --> No-one was here)
	Af pa'am lo nafalti ( time no I-fell --> I never fell)

Arguably, the word for "nothing" in such languages does not mean the
same as "nothing" in English. It requires a negative verb form because
syntactically it means "something" or "someone", although semantically
it means "nothing" or "no-one".  The Hebrew word "af" seems to fit this;
it can't be translated any better than "no", but it always requires a
negative verb. As can be seen from the above examples, it can be used
with "one" to mean "no-one", with "time" to mean "never". Another word,
"shum", has the same function with "thing":
	Lo ra'iti shum davar  (No I-saw  thing -> I saw nothing)
(as far as I can determine, "shum davar" and "clum" are interchangeable
terms for "nothing" [cf. English no-one and no-body])

Dave Sherman    (unfinished Linguistics major 1978)
Toronto
-- 
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