Love Those Double Negatives! People usually want to do things right, fit in, be liked. When you go to a foreign country, with a different culture and a strange language, it can be extremely easy to make mistakes, say things you don’t mean, and even make things worse by trying to undo what could have been avoided in the first place. It’s normal and can be quite frustrating.
Spanish-speaking and English-speaking cultures both belong to what we are wont to call the “Western World,” and at least on the surface they indeed resemble each other: they both adhere to Judeo-Christian values and even their languages share many common or similar terms, as well as the same basic syntactical structure: Somebody or Something (subject) does something (verb) to something or someone (direct object) to benefit or harm something or someone (indirect object) at some point in time, someplace, for one reason or another, and in one way or another (prepositional phrase). Yet beyond this we discover hundreds of details that set these cultures apart and make things a little awkward for those unaware that these discrepancies exist. On the linguistic level, the differences between Spanish and English are fascinating. Take the double negative for instance. One of the first rules one learns as a child in the U.S. or Great Britain is not to say things like “I don’t have no money.” One’s mother would inevitably come back with “I don’t have any money.” “Of course!”, you then said to yourself once it all sunk in. “If you don’t have no money, it means that you have some money, which I don’t, so I shouldn’t use any double negatives in oral or written language.” Then maybe your little brother might have walked in, and overhearing your little speech, he would say, “Don’t give me none of that garbage.” To which you would have no printable answer.
Well, in Spanish it doesn’t work that way at all, meaning that your little brother would fit in just fine because in Spanish-speaking countries double negatives are not only acceptable, but also unavoidable and absolutely necessary. Let’s imagine this scene, for example. Guillermina asks her brother Vicente to lend her twenty pesos. She needs to buy a notebook for school:
—Vicente, préstame 20 pesos para comprar un cuaderno.
—Sólo te puedo prestar 10. Voy a ir al cine. (I can only lend you ten. I’m going to go to the movies.)
—¡Entonces no me des nada! (So then don’t give me anything!)
If she had said in English, “So then don’t lend me nothing,” she would have been on the wrong side of the grammatical tracks, but not in Spanish. One could conceivably say “Entonces no me des algo,” but it would not mean the same thing. That algo would have to refer to something mentioned beforehand, but that we no longer want to say aloud. It could also refer to something in the positive sense of anything, as in cualquier cosa: “Vicente, préstame tu suéter, tu chamarra, cualquier cosa, porque tengo frío” (Vicente, lend me your sweater, your jacket, anything; I’m cold). The double negative can also be used when talking about time: “Tomás no vino nunca.” “Xavier no me pagará jamás.” These negative terms in Spanish would have to be the equivalent of the positive ever or at all in English: “Tomás did not come at all.” “Xavier won’t pay me back ever.” Of course, in English one could always stick with the simple negative, as in Spanish: “Tomás never came.” “Tomás nunca vino.” But the double negative is triumphantly emphatic and final, especially in the common and useful phrase nunca jamás. If Eugenia didn’t like the kiss you just gave her, she might very well scream the following: “No me vuelvas a besar nunca jamás.”
Another common double negative that is often fumbled by English speakers is the Spanish equivalent of either, as in “He didn’t do it either.” As one can see, in English there is no double negative, but in Spanish one must say “Él no lo hizo tampoco.” The opposite of tampoco is también, which leads many people to say things that ring strange in the ears of natives, sentences like “Él no lo hizo también” or “Yo no fui también” instead of “Él no lo hizo tampoco.” “Yo no fui tampoco.” The non-double negative versions would be “Él tampoco lo hizo” and “Yo tampoco fui.”
If you were a spy on a stakeout by a railway station from three to five in the morning and no one came around, in English you would say “No one came.” But in Spanish you would most likely resort to the double negative: “No vino nadie.” Never “No vino alguien.” But you could use the less emphatic (and more literary) “Nadie vino.”No governments will fall (no caerá ningún gobierno) if we don’t master the double negative, but we will run the risk of raising eyebrows right and left if we strictly follow the rules of English syntax in cases like these. Do you remember the old maxim, “Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary, so ain’t ain’t a word? And then there’s the song that Diana Krall sings so admirably: “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t (My Baby)”, by Billy Austin and Louis Jordan. It puts a whole different spin on the word ain’t and… double positives? Well, there isn’t any ain’t in Spanish, so there isn’t anything (ain’t nothing?) to worry about. It does sound a whole lot better in Spanish, though: “No hay nada de qué preocuparse.” Really. (Is you is or is you ain’t understandin’?)
If you would like to know more about any idiomatic expressions
you may have heard, or about any Spanish-language difficulties,
feel free to contact me at sandrocohen@gmail.com
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