Heard on Judge Joe Brown:

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, Russian works the same way:

Nikakoi rebenok ne poekhal na nikakom bitsiklete v nikakoi dom!
No        child     not rode      on no          bicycle into no       house!

As in non-standard English, multiple negation is not an indication of
emphasis. However, in Russian, multiple negation is required and is
not a stylistic or a dialectal variant.

-Wilson

On 7/11/07, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on Judge Joe Brown:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >"Didn't no kid ride no bicycle into no house!"
>
> I love this. The negative concordance is so thoroughgoing! "Logical"
> analysis (which insists that double negatives are positives) should
> hand in its foil and weep in the face of the efficacy of phrases such
> as this. It brings to mind vulgar concordance, as in the classic
> phrase "Fuck off, ya fuckin' fuck" and, rather more loosely, one I
> recently saw, "Our good shit makes their shit look like shit."
>
> James Harbeck.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org