Re: OT: Negation as the indicative standard

In a message dated 1/18/2004 12:37:56 PM Eastern Standard Time,
axiem@FASTMAIL.FM writes:

>What he was curious about is if there's a language that does it the other
>way around. That is, a standard indicative sentence is normally negative,
>and an extra word/morpheme/something must be added to make it an
>affirmative.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that no natural language does this, but
one comes close, in that a negative sentence needs a negative particle and a
positive sentence needs a positive particle, so that both are equally marked.

Now, if only I could recall where I read that and what language was alleged
to have that feature . . .

Doug

Reply