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Carrion Luggage #1101943 added November 19, 2025 at 9:07am
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Ne Plus Ultra
Everyone's a nerd about something. Here's a language nerd with some negativity, from Upworthy:
Learning about language—whether diving into newfangled phrases taking over the current zeitgeist, or examining the unexpected threads that tie seemingly unrelated languages together throughout history—is endlessly fascinating. All at once, clues about humanity’s past, present, and future are revealed.
As with many things, I find this stuff fascinating, but I still have a lot to learn.
For instance, why do so many words with a negative connotation begin with the letter “n”? Sure, there are obvious exceptions, like nice, nifty, neat, etc., but when you think about not, never, nothing, nihilistic, nought, and yes, even the word negative itself…seems like a lot.
I have heard that "nice" started out kind of negative. It had the denotation that's now its sarcastic connotation, and wasn't at all a good thing to say about someone or something.
Also, this is one reason why I insist that the first decade of this century should be called the noughties.
In a short-and-sweet video, he explains that in the days of Old English, the word “ne,” meaning “not,” was used to negate, or give the opposite meaning, of virtually anything. N + one + “none,” n + either + "neither," and so on.
Spoiler: I didn't watch the video. I'm not giving clicks to portrait-oriented video. It's my little act of naughty rebellion.
Even with English words that were borrowed from Latin, as well as other non-English languages like French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit, we see this pattern. That’s because the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother of all these languages, also used the word “ne” to negate meaning.
As far as I know, French is the only surviving one of these languages to still use the word "ne." It also features double negatives as standard grammar, which I'm sure pisses off math nerds. Oh, wait, I'm a math nerd, too, and it doesn't piss me off.
If there are other languages that use it, feel free to contradict me there. Like I said, I still have a lot to learn.
However, just to complicate things a bit, we also see this in languages that did not originate from Proto-Indo-European, like Japanese and Vietnamese. This prompted a linguist by the name of Otto Jespersen in the late 1880s to theorize that there must be some primal association of negative feelings with the “n” sound.
I'd call it more "hypothesize" than "theorize," but I'm also a science nerd.
Over a hundred years later, researchers tested the theory, and found that this correlation was more of a coincidence.
So it never reached the level of "theory" as used in science.
Obviously, the biggest takeaway from all this is a new level of appreciation for the Knights that say Ni!
Well, obviously. Duh. |
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