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I don't think its as much that everything positive is just a non-negative, but that everything (especially emotions) is shifted towards the medium. Maybe it comes from a desire to not be abrasive and always soften everything, but I'm not sure.
In Polish, 'niezły' (literally 'not bad') means 'very good'. Even in English there are many such things, e.g. 'indestructible', 'immortal'.
When it comes to labels on food there is "no preservatives" or similar. It even has its parodies, e.g. "asbestos-free oat cereal" (https://xkcd.com/641/).
In Australia from my experience "not bad" = "good", "pretty good" = "amazing", "bit shit" = "really shit". I don't think its as much that everything positive is just a non-negative, but that everything (especially emotions) is shifted towards the medium. Maybe it comes from a desire to not be abrasive and always soften everything, but I'm not sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite right, but not quite wrong, no? The pattern seems similar, but I think of litotes (as the Wikipedia article suggests) as a rhetorical device: the assertion-by-negation carries an ironic charge, and strikes the (Western) ear by standing out from the ordinary affirmative register. If I'm understanding the author's account of Chinese assertion-by-negation correctly, doesn't it sound like assertion-by-negation…
I think it's especially American English that doesn't use litotes as much as British English or the other Western European languages. This piece seems to be very much about American English, when I read something like: > In English, this feels bizarre. If something is good, you say: Nice Great Perfect Brilliant
This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal). At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem…
As a Brit, I'm not quite sure this article is right in it's declaration it's a universal "English" thing and not more "American English".
I would say Australian English relies on this negation even more than British English, to the point of being confusing without more cultural context.
There are some direct ways to express agreement in Chinese, like 對 or 好. At the same time, the negative statements described are not unique to Chinese at all. It's not that deep, really.
不错 is literally "not bad", but it's more positive than the American English equivalent, being basically semantically equal to 很好 (lit. "very good", although in practice just plain old good/OK). You can even say seemingly absurd things like 很不错 "very not bad" (= excellent); or you can tamp it down with 还不错 "also not bad".
Funnily enough, in British English, "not bad" is high praise; but you still wouldn't say "very not bad".