This is dedicated to friends of double negatives and to those who have wondered what the word pas, “step,” has to do with negation in French

‘I don’t eat a step’

You French lovers (or loathers) have probably mulled over why you have to use the word pas, “step,” to form negation. Je ne sais pas. Well, actually I do. And it’s quite interesting. The thing is that in early French it was enough to use only ne. However, to convey the meaning of “not a bit” or “not at all,” people used various words with the ne (these examples are courtesy of John McWhorter’s fabulous book The Power of Babel—I highly recommend it):

Goutte ‘drop’: Elle ne boit “she doesn’t drink”

Elle ne boit goutte “she doesn’t drink a drop”
 

Mie ‘crumb’: Elle ne mange “she doesn’t eat”

Elle ne mange mie “she doesn’t eat a crumb.”
 

In the same way, pas was used only with walking-verbs:

Il ne marche “he doesn’t walk”

Il ne marche pas ‘“he doesn’t walk a step.”
 

These goutte-mie-pas expressions lost their mojo with time and no longer had a more powerful meaning than the simple ne form (it is very common that the meaning of words gets diluted like that—”awesome,” for example, no longer means “causing awe” but is simply another casual way of saying “cool”). Since these extra words no longer mattered, people stopped using them. For some reason though, pas survived. At this point, because ne...pas had the same meaning as ne alone, the initial literal sense “step” was lost and through the generations the French started interpreting pas as a grammatical thing that had to be used in negation with verbs describing movement. By the 1500s, the use of pas had spread over French grammar like a virus and occured with all types of verbs. At first it was optional but soon it became a habit and finally the rule. Language changes like that, when a word with a concrete meaning becomes a word that only expresses a function of grammar, it is called grammaticalization. So that’s the story of how the humble pas got its veto.
 

Is double negation a no, no?

The French are considered chic and smart—but they do indeed have double negation, which so many English grammarians claim is illogical since “two negatives equal a positive” (the French even have triple negatives: Je n’ai jamais aimé personne – literally ‘I have not never loved nobody’!). The fact is that in languages of the world, double negation is very common and welcomed as the standard form. Even Old English had double negatives: Ic ne can noht singan, literally “I not can nothing sing” (again, example courtesy of The Power of Babel by John McWhorter). Double negation was the norm. Shakespeare himself gives us examples of it. By the 1500s, the English dialect spoken in London just happened to have developed an alternative single negative, but it was not considered superior: He didn’t see anything instead of he didn’t see nothing. In the late 1700s, however, a few scholars obsessed with Latin grammar oh-so-cleverly concluded that since Latin did not allow double negation, this was illogical in English too. This marked the beginning of the non-standard English speakers’ war of defending their innocent double negatives. Since people were taught that it was wrong to use them, they weren’t seen on paper anymore and the next generations grew up with the single negation being the right one. So in short, those who speak Standard English can blame their ignorant criticism of double negation on Latin influence, while you who speak a non-standard variety, including African-American English, should be proud.