Re: negatives and double negatives

In a message dated 8/28/2005 1:22:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
travis65610@YAHOO.COM writes:

>i think it would be awesome to work in some cool negatives, like french
'ne... >guere' (hardly, barely) and 'ne... que' (only) into a conlong. i'm sure it
would be pretty easy >to express 'almost' as a negative, since it means x
didn't happen anyway. can anyone else >think of some other ideas expressable as
negative constructions, and/or examples from >natlangs?

I read somewhere that in some languages, verbs in "before" clauses are always
negated, so that to express "I ate before you arrived" you would say
literally "I ate before you didn't arrive."  The logic apparently is that at the
moment of my eating you had not arrived, so "arrived" should be negated.

Doug

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