"Declan Murphy" <declan_murphy@hotmail.com> wrote ...
> Paul Blay wrote:
>> Not to mention that, IIRC*, zenzen used to be used with postitives waaay
>> back before the 'zenzen goes with negatives' rule came about.
>
> Where?

Now I look back I see I was mis-remembering what I'd read.
It was, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, that 全然
could from the start be used with grammatically positive
sentences that have negative meanings (e.g. 全然違う).
However it does also do an interesting interpretation of why
全然大丈夫 has come to be widely accepted while 全然うれしい
doesn't sound right.

http://www.atok.com/nihongo/vol04.html

DNS error when I tried to get it just now, so here's the Google cache link.

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:DmXSVCRzrOoJ:www.atok.com/nihongo/vol04.html+www.atok.com/nihongo/vol04.html+%E5%85%A8%E7%84%B6%E5%A4%A7%E4%B8%88%E5%A4%AB&hl=ja