LL-L "Morphology" 2003.04.16 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 16.APR.2003 (04) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: jari at delphisexpress.com <jari at delphisexpress.com>
Subject: Nee

As to the double negation "no no" and so on, a few points:

You don't have to go to China to find the same kind of affirmative answers
to
negative questions. The same practice of answering a negative question
with "yes" to confirm the negation is found in Bulgarian for instance.

But there are two things here that should be kept apart:

1) the logical rule that a double negation makes an affirmative sentence.

2) the tendency to keep the written language "tidy" by avoiding "useless"
repetition of grammatical elements.

I think it is this last tendency that accounts for the abhorrence felt
towards
double negation in written language.

Maybe the case of Finnish is illuminating. We can't use double negation
really,
because we don't have special words for "nobody", "nothing", "nowhere" etc.
They always have to be pointed out by the word "not".

(To come back to Afrikaans, this is also something to note in the
construction "nooit...nie" etc. Maybe in this case the two negative words
could
be regarded as a double negation. On the other hand, simply repeating the
word "not" is a reduplication and not a double negation.)

So in Finnish we can't use the double negative. But we have something else
to
illustrate the point. Finnish normative grammar has the cruel rule of
disposing
of all the "unnecessary" grammatical elements marking the passive. This
leads
to solutions in the passive perfect tense that don't sound natural.

So maybe the abhorrence felt towards the double negative is actually an
abhorrence felt towards grammatical redundance in general.

Jari [Nousiainen]

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From: jari at delphisexpress.com <jari at delphisexpress.com>
Subject: Ja

As to the discussion on "yes" + personal ending, let me mention, as a point
of
interest, that exactly the same phenomenon takes place in Finnish - only,
with "no". "No I" is "en", "no you" is "et" and "no he" is "ei". The
personal
forms are the only change the word "ei" (=no) ever goes through (no tenses,
for
instances). Interestingly enough, the same phenomenon is unknown in
Estonian,
the closest related language.

The word for "yes" is rarely used. Instead the whole verb of the question is
repeated as a confirmation. That means that the personal endings and tenses
etc. show in the affirmative answer.

Jari [Nousiainen]

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