[Qfwfq]

Yeah, humour is much related to our intelligence, and intelligence is necessary for the message not to be noise.

[Turtle]

The community was shocked at the news of the terrible murder.

[Turtle]

The clerk took a bad beating.

[mynah]

Originally Posted by eric l

It seems a bit strange that you have no reactions from your South African members, since in Afrikaans the double negative is absolutely standard. (This first sentence in Afrikaans would become something like "... no reactions from none of your South African members")
In French, there is a problem : "jamais" as an exclamation means "never", but if used in a sentence, it has to be matched by "ne"
But double negative iare colloquially used in many local variants of Dutch as well, and I think in many other languages, too. I do remember hearing things like "nobody told me nothing..."

"Nobody told me nothing" would be bad Afrikaans if directly translated, though. The actual sentence would translate to something more like "Nobody did me anything tell not." (No wonder foreign languages are hard to learn...)

An interesting (and often baffling, to others) expression used as a reply in Afrikaans is "Ja-nee", which translates literally as "Yes-no", and means, more or less, "Agreed".