Don Antonio Magino

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’.