什么都 / 谁也

RuleInterrogative pronoun (shenme/shei/nar) + dou/ye: the question word expresses "every / any." With a negative it means "none at all."

Curiosity

shenme means "what." Yet "anything" in "I do not eat anything" also uses shenme? How?

Intuition

Adding dou/ye after a question word flips it to "without exception, all of it." dou/ye is the broom that sweeps in the entire range the question word covers. With a negative, it negates that whole range.

Visualization

Reorder the English-like [I][don't eat][anything] into Chinese [I][shenme][dou][don't eat]. shenme moves before the verb, dou inserts after it.

English-like (question word last)

我subject不吃verb什么interrogative pronoun

Chinese order (question word + dou fronted)

我subject什么interrogative pronoun都都/也 (every / any)不吃verb

Essence

Question word + dou/ye + (negative). Positive gives "every" (shei dou zhidao, "everyone knows"); negative gives total denial (shenme dou bu chi, "eat nothing"). ye mostly pairs with negatives (yidian ye bu). The question word is pulled to the front or right after the subject.

Examples

我什么都不想吃。

I do not want to eat anything.

这件事谁都知道。

Everyone knows about this.

周末我哪儿也没去。

I did not go anywhere over the weekend.

Mini-quiz

Which expresses "nobody knows"?