So usually with い-adjectives, the negative form is 〜くない as in おいしい and おいしくない
So why is 少ない “few” and not “not a few” or “a lot”? Does that make sense?
Just curious if there is a linguistic or perhaps cultural/historical reason for this, or if it’s just one of those weird exceptions you just have to get in your brain. Thanks!
少ない is not a negative form. That’s just the plain adjective.
The negative form is 少なくない, following the standard rules for i-adjective conjugation.
So rather than being a negation of an adjective meaning “few,” this is an adjective meaning “few.” Even though it has ない in there, it’s the affirmative form.
I don’t know about the etimology, but if it helps to get it into your brain, it can be inflected in the negative just like any other i-adjective: 少なくない;
この種の人間も少なくない.
There are quite a few people of this sort.
More edit: I can’t think of another adjective ending in -kunai, but there are some that end in -nai, such as _kitanai, tsumaranai etc.
Further edit about the example sentence: the fact that 少なくない is translated as quite a few might throw people off. Perhaps I didn’t choose the best example sentence. A very literal translation of that sentence would be “People of this kind are not few.”