English everyone (+ singular) and all (+ plural) differ in that the former always refers to humans, the latter to humans or nonhumans. Everyone knows the answer. All know the answer. However all has many other functions and is rarely used as a pronoun. Even the example just given sounds odd. More normal is They all know the answer. or All of the students know the answer. Most other mIE languages lack an indefinite pronoun like everyone. Instead, they simply use a catch-all word like all (+ plural).
The Romance languages stand out by expressing ‘everyone’ by means of an idiom meaning roughly ‘the whole world’, e.g., French tout le monde [all the world] ‘everyone’. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages employ a combination of ‘someone’ + negative particle meaning something like ‘not someone’ = ‘everyone”.
The mIE languages express ‘no one’ variously but without exception employ third person singular in agreement: No one knows. Most non-Germanic families resort to a double negative, e.g., Romanian Nimeni nu stie. [no one not knows]. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian use second only when another negative IP is present: Portuguese Ninguém sabe de nada. [no one knows about nothing] ‘No one knows anything.’ Otherwise they stick with a single negative, as in English.
English Everyone knows3sg. No one knows3sg.
Icelandic Allir vita3pl. [all know] Enginn veit3sg. [no one knows]
French Tout le monde le sait3sg. [all the world it knows] Personne ne le sait3sg. [no one not it knows]
Italian Lo sanno3pl tutti. [it know all] Nessuno lo sa3sg. [no one it knows]
Irish Tá3sg a fhios ag gach duine. [is its knowledge at every person] (‘knowledge’ is the subject)
Níl3sg a fhios ag aon duine. [not+is its knowledge at any person]
Welsh Mae3sg pawb yn gwybod. [is everyone in know]
Does3sg neb yn gwybod. [not is anyone in know]
Latvian Visi zina3pl. [all know] Neviens nezina3sg. [no one not+knows]
Russian Vse znajut3pl. [all know] Nikto ne znaet3sg. [no one not knows]
Armenian Bolore giten3pl. [all know] Voč ok čgiti3sg. [no one not knows]
Pashto har-tsók pohey̌ge3sg. [everyone knows] hič-cók na pohey̌ge3sg. [no one not knows]
Bengali sôbāi jāne3sg. [everyone knows] keu jāne nā3sg. [someone knows not]
Regarding double negatives, one Quora user wrote, “in a negative statement [in the Slavic languages] all words that can be negated must be negated. For example, Croatian, which is my native language:
*Nitko se ničega ne sjeća. – Nobody can remember anything. (Literally: nobody nothing not remebers.)
*Nitko nikad nije nikome ništa učinio. – Nobody has ever done anything to anyone. (Literally: nobody never hasn’t to no-one nothing done.)
Sentences with three or four negative words aren’t uncommon at all.1
A Reddit observer commented, “[In English] the stigma of double negatives is that the person using them is perceived as uneducated, unsophisticated, etc. Some people use them thinking it makes them sound cool, but for my generation, it sounds stupid.2
- https://www.quora.com/Which-languages-have-double-negation-e-g-like-Spanish ↩︎
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ENGLISH/comments/yd8sx3/double_negative/ ↩︎
GRAMMAR
Double Negative refers to the use of two or more negatives in a sentence to express negation. In English it seems illogical–the two negatives cancel each other out: They don’t know nothing. must mean that they know something. In languages where double neagtives are the norm, they may add emphasis to the negation or a double negative is simply the way negtion is achieved.