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A college linguistics professor was discussing double-negatives with his class. He said, "In English, a double-negative creates a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double-negative is still a negative. However, in no language does a double-*positive *make a negative.
A student in the back row called out, “Yeah, right.”
While I find the joke very funny, I’m curious about the statement, “In some languages, such as Russian, a double-negative is still a negative.” Is this true? I’m sure that at some point I’m going to tell the joke in the presence of a Russian-speaker and they’re going to tell me, “That’s wrong.”
I asked a coworker, an immigrant from Belarus, about this, but she was only about 4 years old when her family moved here and while she can speak Russian, she’s not well-versed in the language’s grammatical rules.
I know this is true in Polish, and have heard that it is true for many slavic languages (of which, Russian is one). However, I can’t confirm that it is true in Russian.
However, I would note that it is not so much a “double negative” as an “agreement of negativity”. If you have more words that need to agree it could be a triple, quadruple, etc negative. But the words aren’t negating each other the way they do in English. They are agreeing about the negativity.
Also, it would be grammatically incorrect to use a single negative in these cases.
e.g. it is wrong to say “I didn’t get anything.” One should properly say “I didn’t get nothing.”
The last is not acceptable in English because of the double negative - not knowing nothing would mean that you know something, right?
In Russian, Ya nye znayu nichevo is the correct way of saying it, and it does indeed correspond to the English “I not know nothing.” Think of it this way - in Russan, (and Italian, for that matter) the negatives must agree. To say Ya znayu nichevo is as grating and wrong-seeming as saying in English “They does nothing” - the verb and subject don’t agree in number, it should be either ‘They do nothing’ or ‘It does nothing’.
Japanese works this way sometimes. For example, the word *shika *means “nothing but” and is always used along with a negative verb.
コーヒーを飲みません。 Koohii o nomimasen.
I do not drink coffee.
コーヒーしか飲みません。 Koohii shika nomimasen.
I do not drink anything but coffee.
ETA: Literally, “I do not drink nothing but coffee.”
A **linguistics **professor would almost certainly never say this, by the way. There are plenty of dialects in English where multiple negation can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Compare the two sentences (both grammatically correct from an objective linguistic point of view):
I didn’t not want to go. ← two negatives = tentatively positive
I ain’t never going. ← two negatives = very negative
English isn’t math, and the “no double negatives” rule is an artificial one imposed from outside (like not splitting infinitives).
it’s true in all Slavic languages, and as has been said above, it extends to all the parts of a sentence (if that makes sense), so ‘No one told anyone anything about anything’ becomes No one told no one nothing about nothing. (Nikto ne govoril nikomu nichego ni o chom - in Russian)
I recall being taught when I was learning ancient Greek that multiple negatives tended to add emphasis, but it’s been a long time ago.
On the other hand, I was having a little skype converstaion with a Russian, who (IIRC) corrected me when I said я не понемаю немного. (Lit: I not understand not much.).
Yeah, it’s been a few years since Russian 100, but if I recall correctly, you could have dropped the He and it would have been fine - ‘I understand little’. I’m not sure, but I think what you said implied “There is little I don’t understand.”
*nemnogo *(little) does not relate to *mnogo *(much) the way *nikto *(no one) relates to *kto *(who) - it is not really a negative, it’s just idiom. That’s why ‘ya ne ponimayu nemnogo’ is wrong - it’s not a question of dropping the ne-, it’s a question of not needing it in the first place. It does seem to imply there’s little that you don’t understand, but if you want to say that, you would have to go with ‘Est’ malo chto ya ne ponimayu’.
Naw, “no [noun]” really should be “ain’t no [noun]”, as in “She ain’t no kin to you, noways, so why you worrying about what she’s doing?”. Although you can also say “aint [got/had] no”, as in “I ain’t had no cornbread all week.”
If I remember correctly, originally all Indo-European languages treated double-negatives as negative. English only changed recently, when the language was remodeled along “logical” lines in the nineteenth century.
Both work in English–it all depends on context, and no native speaker would be confused by the difference. You’re correct that it only became “exlusively” positive (quotes to indicate that only perception changed, not the actual grammar) when someone tried to force it into an artificial model of language.
I’m just here to point out that this isn’t a joke but rather a specific quotation.
During a lecture by J.L. Austin (of Oxford) at Columbia University, it was Sidney Morgenbesser (, a professor there (here, actually) that uttered the phrase, which I’ve only heard quoted as
I’ve never heard any mention of Russian or the 2*neg == neg aspect of your joke being part of Austin’s statement. Nonetheless, for what it’s worth, I’ll nth previous statements that it does hold in Russian.
BTW - I’m writing this ~500 feet from the hall this statement originated in.
