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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1735 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 5, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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According to English grammar and logic, if you say "There's not nothing," you are saying that there is something. According to Spanish grammar, if you say "no hay nada," you are asserting that there is nothing. But within Spanish logic, should "no hay nada" mean that there is nothing, or that there is something? I understand the level of "logic" of Spanish that dictates that the "no" must agree with the "nada" but in English the "not" cancels out the "nothing" and makes it something (even though most people who use double negatives- "ain't nothing" for example- are implying the Spanish "logic" of matching.)

In other words, if you have grown up speaking only Spanish your whole life, would you believe that the "no" SHOULD cancel out the "nada," in the way that English speakers often understand that "I could care less" is used to mean "I couldn't care less," or is it completely logical within the language of Spanish for the "no" to match the "nada"?

I haven't grown up speaking only Spanish my whole life, but I expect those who have would apply Spanish-intuition to English.

I think "I could care less" is like "could of" -- people say it because it sounds right and they don't think about the logic. People do not say "I could care less" because the logic checks out. So in that sense it is unrelated to (double) negatives.

The funnest fact I know: Famously, "Si" is "yes" in Spanish and "Oui" is "yes" in French. But "Si" also means "yes" in French: "yes, in a no kind of way."

Alice: "You didn't get a TV, right?"

Bob: "Yes."

Confusing, right? As a stupid autistic person, I got used to replying "Correct" or "Wrong" to these kinds of questions.

French still does that? I only recently learned that English used to have those distinctions, between "yes/no" and "yea/nay".

The funnest fact I know: Famously, "Si" is "yes" in Spanish and "Oui" is "yes" in French. But "Si" also means "yes" in French: "yes, in a no kind of way."

“Si” can also mean “maybe” in Spanish, when it’s a latina confirming that your date is on.

I was taught that si means if, while sí means yes. The accent mark is meaningful as written, although not IIRC pronounced differently for single-syllable words.

Latinos often omit diacritics when writing informally. Latinas will even add a “p” for a “sip” to be Cute in proffering a nominal “yes”.

The funnest fact I know: Famously, "Si" is "yes" in Spanish and "Oui" is "yes" in French. But "Si" also means "yes" in French: "yes, in a no kind of way."

One of my favorite parts of Korean (and probably all East Asian languages) compared to the western ones is that yes means yes and no means no, and the listener is expected to do the job of figuring out the proper negative multiplying. So, if Bob didn't get the TV and decides to be honest, when Alice asks him "You didn't get the TV?" he just says, "Yes [I didn't]," not "No [I didn't]" like an American and not "Yes (special) [I didn't]" like a Frenchman. Because of course a positive word used to answer a question with a negative should imply affirming the negative, and having the rule be that just because the answer affirms a negative, the word that's used should be the negative one makes things needlessly confusing.

My pet theory is that a lot of people slot "negative" and "positive" into two wide swathes of things, such that using a negative word just places something into that "negative" swath, instead of seeing those things as modifiers, such that using a negative word causes the original thing to be negated, possibly to a positive state. And so the former types of people experience dissonance at double negatives or more, especially when using a positive word affirms an explicitly stated negative statement (all positive terms can affirm another negative statement, of course, but the fact that these words were actually spoken out loud and in recent proximity seem to be important parts of what causes the dissonance).

Yes, programmers would briefly describe this theory as "statelessness and idempotency is easy" or put more commonly, "math is hard."

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