[Lexicog] On supposed "double negatives"

[Kenneth C. Hill]

In my work with Uto-Aztecan languages I have not encountered double
negatives with a resultant negative meaning. Quite the contrary. For
example, Hopi has two negatives, qa and son or so'on. When they cooccur in
the same clause, the result is positive, meaning necessarily, surely, it
must be. Here's an example from the Hopi Dictionary (under son):

Pay naat son ason qa yokvani.
well yet NEG eventually NEG will.rain
It will inevitably rain when the time comes.

--Ken

--- Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya.org> wrote:

> On 29/01/2005 22:07, rtroike at email.arizona.edu wrote:
>
> >Peter,
> >
> >     Your recollection is certainly good. ...
> >
>
> Thank you!
>
> >...
> >
> >     I've (randomly) encountered this "agreement" phenomenon in
> Egyptian Arabic,
> >where an enclitic pronoun "-ish" (I think) has been recruited for this
> purpose,
> >and in Burmese. The underlying psychology that would reproduce this
> same
> >structural effect so widely may be rooted in the communicative need to
> make the
> >negation clear to a hearer. Why the second element comes to be
> interpreted as
> >the primary negator is mysterious.
> >
> >
> >
> Another interesting example is in Azerbaijani, another language in which
>
> a double negative has a negative meaning. (Indeed, are there any
> languages in which it does not apart from upper-class Latin and
> upper-class English?) In this Turkic language negation is marked on the
> verb, and can be emphasised or further specified by either a negative
> adverb, pronoun etc or by a positive one. The Arabic adverb "aslaa",
> meaning something like "actually" or "originally", has become commonly
> used as a loan word with negative sentences with a meaning like "at all"
>
> or "ever" in English, i.e. strengthening the negative. And, with its
> original Arabic meaning forgotten, it has then been reinterpreted as a
> negative word which can be used in the sense "not at all" or "never"
> even when there is no negative verb associated with it. Thus the word
> has come to mean precisely the opposite of what it originally meant.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter at qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
>
> --
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>
>



		
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