You can't claim you're not surprised? So you can claim you are surprised? You're surprised by this. I feel like I'm trying to understand double negatation logic in code haha
In English, there is a sentence structure like ‘I ain’t telling nobody’, which means ‘I won’t tell anyone’, but for me it’s difficult to decipher as well. Why it’s not like ‘I’m telling nobody’ or ‘I’m not telling anyone’? Why the double negative — ain’t and nobody — means negative as well.
Same issue is here. I don’t understand whether they were surprised or not. I assume they are not surprised. But the difficulty of the phrasing makes me wonder the meaning behind it.
I think you mean "I can't say I'm surprised" -> this is not at all surprising. But that's just one negative.
"I can't say I'm surprised" or "I'm not surprised" would be much clearer here if the intention is to say this is NOT surprising. "I can't say I'm not surprised" is confusing enough that the intention is not clear. Logically it implies surprise.
Makes me wonder if it might be a linguistic eddy echoing from the clash of Germanic and Latin-based French, where negation contracted with the word is also very common (no idea if n'est and friends had been a thing in French at the time that clash happened)
Last time, someone described how this is quite common, but that the opposite - "double positives" were always positive as there's no negation.
Then someone else replied: "Yeah, right!"