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Funnily enough, in Russian the double negative is completely normal and that is a normal way to express many negatives. It always triggers my brain when I have to say a double negative in Russian, "just do it, it's completely normal, don't worry about it..." (inner feeling-based monologue).

https://www.russiantutoring.com/post/double-negation-in-russ...




Reminds me of a classic linguistics joke (I assume from a Tom Scott video given where I encounter linguistics the most):

A professor is lecturing on linguistics: "In English a double negative has a positive meaning. However, in some languages—such as Russian—a double negative still has a negative meaning. There isn't, however, a language in which a double positive holds a negative meaning."

A student in the back responds: "Yeah, right."


This is widely attributed to Sidney Morgenbesser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser).


This reminds me of ruminations with a friend about the nuance of combined positive/negative affirmations. Eg “no yeah” used as an emphatic agreement in the positive, and “yeah no” an emphatic agreement in the negative.


The high-brow name for this syntactic gadget is “negative concord”[1], and Wikipedia lists plenty of languages that have it[2] (including several European ones and even Old English!).

[1] http://glottopedia.org/index.php/Negative_concord

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative




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