I found this in An t-Oileánach:



The English is 'before long he began to give up his visits to the field altogether'.

Why doesn't gan further negate this? I.e. why does this not translate to 'Before long he began to give up not going to the field altogether/at all'. Does the inferred negative quality of tabhair suas make superfluos? Thanks in advance.

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I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

I don’t know. Just two ideas:
1) There could be tabhairt suas do dhul ’on ghort, maybe even … don dul … ("giving up the going")
Could it be a confusion of don with gan ? (though don is really pronounced with /d/ in the dialect, not /g/)

2) chuige, "at all", requires probably a kind of negation but there is none, so gan is inserted.

I can't find similar examples to this, but O'Nolan wrote of elliptical Irish sentences in his Studies in Modern Irish Part 1. You could for example, see it is as ag tabhairt suas [agus do cheap sé a aigne] gan dul 'on ghort chuige.,

I don't think it can be wrong. Traditional English had the double negative (I don't know nothing) until the late 18th century, and so all languages can have things like this.

Thank you both. It would make sense for this sentence to simply be a double negative

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I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar