About Negation in English

Re: About Negation in English
I believe 3 to be incorrect. Every body is usually taken as one word "Everybody". If everybody would not like it, it seems that nobody would like it.

In #5, doesn't the second statement contradict the first?

How would you paraphrase #5 then?
Dear Roger,
How would you paraphrase #5 then?

I have suggested alternatives in some cases without knowing the intent of your phrases. They may not suit the purpose.

(2)All the answers are not right.
[None of the answers are correct]

(3)Every body wouldn't like it.
[Nobody would like it.]

(6)We cannot estimate the value of modern science too much.
Replace this with;

We cannot underestimate the value of modern science
or
We cannot estimate the value of modern science too highly
[Value of modern science is high]


(5)It is a wise man that never makes mistakes.
[a man who never makes mistakes would indeed be considered wise]
Not very true in my opinion. Wise men make mistakes and learn from them.
Replace (5) with;
It is a wise man who profits from his mistakes.

(4)It is a long lane that had no turning.
[The lane is long and has nowhere to turn]

Touble with translating Negative statement
The 7 "negative" sentences are quoted from one article, discussing how an English negative sentence should be understood and translated into Chinese. We (teachers and students alike) are always puzzled by the so-called surface meaning and the deep meaning of these sentences. We are told by some scholars studying these sentences that we should not translate them "literally", that is we should not understand these sentences by their surface meanings.
The 7 paraphrases in square brackets are attached to show how I understand these scholars' negative interpretations of the original sentences in a positive way.
If you native speakers of English do not comprehend these sentences the way some Chinese scholars do, then we will always have trouble communicating with each other when we have these "negative" sentences.
I will find out more of these sentences for discussion and see what interesting results we will come up with.

HA! A humerous (but true) anecdote

Ask an Australian something and he'll tell what its not.

How far is it?..... not far mate [its only a short distance)

How are you going?..... Not too bad thanks mate. [I am well thanks]

How much did you pay for that?....... not bloody much mate. [i paid only a small amount]

How long till we get there?..... not long now mate. [a short time only].

My daughter learned Swedish in a school in Sweden. Her text book told her that moose have antennae. We believe the book meant antlers. antennae would belong to a radio or television.

Ok back to your seven sentences.

Re: About Negation in English


It is a wise man that never makes mistakes.
A man who makes mistakes can also be wise.

One problem here is that several of these sentences are actually very bad English! If I had written Sentences 2 and 3 at school, my teacher would certainly have made me re-write them to remove the ambiguity.

All the answers are not right should be either Not all the answers are right or All the answers are wrong.
Everybody wouldn't like it should be re-written either as Not everybody would like it or as Everybody would dislike it.

Sentence 4 is a proverb, meaning "misfortunes and troubles rarely go on for ever". You shouldn't expect proverbs to make literal grammatical sense, especially as they are often poetic and figurative, and also often very old (the first known use of this one was in 1633), so that they often contain archaic words and grammatical forms.