Editing Double negative (section)

== Historical development ==
[[File:Jespersen's cycle.svg|thumb|250px|An illustration of Jespersen's cycle in French]]
{{main|Jespersen's Cycle}}
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]] {{lang|fro|jeo ne dis}} → Modern Standard French {{lang|fr|je ne dis pas}} → Modern Colloquial French {{lang|fr|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 {{lang|fr|pas}} "step", originally "not a step" = "not a bit"). However, in Germanic languages such as English and German, the intermediate stage was a case of double negation, as the current negatives ''not'' and {{lang|de|nicht}} in these languages originally meant "nothing": e.g. [[Old English]] {{lang|ang|ic ne seah}} "I didn't see" >> [[Middle English]] {{lang|enm|I ne saugh nawiht}}, lit. "I didn't see nothing" >> [[Early Modern English]] ''I saw not''.<ref>Kastovsky, Dieter. 1991. Historical English syntax. p. 452</ref><ref>Van Gelderen, Elly. 2006. ''A history of the English language''. p. 130</ref>

A similar development to a [[circumfix]] from double negation can be seen in non-[[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] languages, too: for example, in [[Maltese language|Maltese]], {{lang|mt|kiel}} "he ate" is negated as {{lang|mt|ma kielx}} "he did not eat", where the verb is preceded by a negative particle {{lang|mt|ma}}- "not" and followed by the particle ''-x'', which was originally a shortened form of {{lang|mt|xejn}} "nothing" - thus, "he didn't eat nothing".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.aboutmalta.com/language/maltesegrammar.htm#ver |title=Grazio Falzon. Basic Maltese Grammar |publisher=Aboutmalta.com |access-date=2013-08-10}}</ref>