Double Negative - History of Languages

History of Languages

Many languages, including all living Germanic languages, French, Welsh and some Berber and Arabic dialects, have gone through a process known as Jespersen's cycle, where an original negative particle is replaced by another, passing through an intermediate stage employing two particles (e.g. Old French jeo ne dis → Modern Standard French je ne dis pas → Modern Colloquial French je dis pas "I don't say"). In many cases the original sense of the new negative particle is not negative per se (thus in French pas "step", originally "not a step" = "not a bit"), but in Germanic languages such as English and German the intermediate stage was a case of double negation, as the current negatives not and nicht in these languages originally meant "nothing": e.g. Old English ic ne seah "I didn't see" >> Middle English I ne saugh nawiht, lit. "I didn't see nothing" >> Early Modern English I saw not. A similar development to a circumfix from double negation can be seen in non-Indo-European languages, too: for example, in Maltese, kiel "he ate" is negated as ma kielx "he didn't eat", where the verb is preceded by a negative particle ma- "not" and followed by the particle -x, which was originally a shortened form of xejn "nothing" - thus, "he didn't eat nothing".