One more literal translation

I heard something in a song yesterday that made me think of one of my favorite literal translation quirks. It has to do with the abuse of the word "do" in English when one wants to indicate a negative.

Let's take an example. In English, we'd say, "I see him." German is the same: Ich sehe ihn. But what if you don't see him? Using a good dose of common sense, German just requires one word to make the negative: Ich sehe ihn nicht, which literally translates to, "I see him not." Now, you could say that in English, but you'd sound like you're about 400 years old and quoting either Shakespeare or the King James Bible. Instead, we commonly say, "I do not see him." (I'll ignore "don't" for now.) Why? Why did English co-opt the verb "do," which means something along the lines of taking an action, and turn it into a helping verb required to connote a negative? I know not.

Let's consider a really perverse sentence in English: "Do you do that?" When you think about it, it's really weird that we use "do" twice in that sentence and that it means something totally different in both places. This is one of the few instances where German comes out shorter than English: Tun Sie das?

And there's no way I'm going to revisit the warped English construction "I'm going to go."