Don Antonio Magino

200 years after Napoleon we’ll all end up speaking French anyway…

So do Americans. Hence why ‘politics’ and ‘news’ on .world by default are American politics and news.

Even the community intended for non-American world news is in practice flooded with American news anyway.

Fun. I learnt about Jespersen’s cycle when we discussed the historical Dutch negation, which, roughly speaking, was [negative particle] [finite verb] in Old Dutch, [negative particle] [finite verb] [negative particle] in Middle Dutch and is [finite verb] [negative particle] in Modern Dutch.

Eg. (using an invented sentence with modern spelling) ‘Ik en/ne hebbe brood’ - ‘Ik en/ne hebbe geen brood’ - ‘Ik heb geen brood’ (‘I don’t have bread’).

I was fascinated by the Middle Dutch ‘double’ negative before I studied Dutch in university (we had to call it a ‘tweeledige ontkenning’, so a two-part negation, instead of ‘dubbele ontkenning’). It’s used in the Early Modern Dutch (±1550-1800) Statenvertaling of the Bible of 1637, when it was already an archaic feature.

The first negation lives on in a so-called ‘petrified’ expression, ‘tenzij’: ‘[he]t en zij’, thus ‘it [negative particle] be [conjunctive]’, meaning ‘unless’.