Question, question or two...

[conuly]

Okay, because I'm a broken record. Two things seem to be a common (and pollable) theme in the recent angsty discussion.

1. "If language changes, eventually we'll have lots of incomprehensible languages instead of just one"
2. "Double negatives are confusing, because two negatives can make a positive".

Now, the first one is pretty much true. Look what happened to Latin, or to Chinese (now Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) However, the question isn't "is this true" but "do we care?". After all, in other places people *expect* to be multi-lingual, to know five or six languages. And we could always go the IAL route, have one auxlang that's not anybody's native language and let the rest of it all go its way.

The second one, I just don't believe. I don't think *anybody* has ever actually gotten confused when hearing a double negative. I know for a fact that it used to be an accepted part of the English language (which, yes, means that the educated classes said it) and that it's a required part of many other languages now. Edit: That's not true. I can certainly believe that *some* people have. However, I don't believe that any native speaker with normal language development has, and I'm fairly certain that most non-native speakers haven't, unless they had a well-meaning (but ill-informed) language instructer tell them that "In English two negatives are a positive", when the reality is "In English, two negatives are a negative, but this usage is considered to be uneducated".

So, poll!

[Poll #409457]

You all know my view by now, so it was hard for me to keep my bias out of this poll. My apologies.

Edit: Wow. I'm honestly surprised. I didn't expect *anybody* would pick "yes, recently, native speaker". Okay, I'm not too surprised with Moggy, because she's not typical I think, but the other (can't spell name gah)? I wasn't expecting that. I still think that my case still stands, most people are never gonna get confused by this usage after childhood. Keep voting, of course. I'm just chattering.

Comments

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

Greek uses double negatives. It's slipping my brain as to what Latin does. Oops.

[adiva_calandia]

I suspect Latin does (not that I speak it) because I know Spanish does, and I suspect the other Romance languages do too.

Personally, I do think people should use the correct number of negatives, but I can understand people who use double negatives perfectly well. Not that I know many people who use them, except to portray hicks. . .(sorry).

Have you considered posting this in linguaphiles?

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

If someone uses "sloppy double negative" grammar and I am not taking them seriously, I will take my opportunity to poke fun at them. If I'm feeling particularly annoyed by it, and there's a chance taking it either as a "- and - equals +" I'll use that to my advantage either way I choose. :-p I understand that dialects and other local/cultural/familial language variances occur, but I prefer if people don't stray terribly far from the standard language. To me, it sounds bad, can cause confusion, and is quite annoying in some extremes.

[conuly]

But why do you consider it sloppy? Would you consider Spanish or French to be sloppy? Why do you think that the standard sounds better, or that nonstandards stray from the standard? The latter certainly isn't the case, and if you want I can explain this in detail.

Oh, hell, you talked me into it. Can you tell this is one of my favorite subjects?

Okay. Let's say we have language A... let's just call this Early Modern English.

Early Modern English has several children. Let's name some of them Standard American English, Standard British English, and AAVE (African American Vernacular English).

Now, it's clear that the two standards are brothers, there is no parental relationship. This is despite angry Britons claiming to understand English better than American. It's also equally clear, from the little chart I didn't draw, that AAVE isn't descended from SAE at all - they're siblings to each other. So AAVE (Ebonics, though I loathe the name) doesn't stray from SAE. Instead, they have *both* strayed from Early Modern English.

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

I've been confused by double negatives that were used humorously to confuse. In most speech it's not confusing at all. "I ain't got nothin'" means "I don't have anything"--it's very clear unless you're refusing to see it clearly because you have old-fashioned notions about what's "proper".

People who jump up and down screaming about how "illogical" double negatives are probably don't know much about language, because if they did, they'd know that many, many languages use double negatives in negation. Like Russian, for example:

Nikto ne zvonil = No one didn't call = No one called

[conuly]

1. Yeah, that makes sense. In that case it's not the double negative that's confusing, it's the intent behind it.

2. I know. I keep trying to say that, but... *sighs*

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

When I was very young, I learned how to read at an early age; I learned the "no double negative" rule very quickly. Maybe because of that (because the rule was already firm in my head), I used to have the occasional problem trying to figure out double negatives in text (never in speech). I'd have to take out the two negatives, read the sentence through, put them back in, and see how it was different.

I'm the only one who's chosen chickens so far?! I am appalled.

[conuly]

It's all about the moo-moo, quack-quack.

O sibili si emgo
Fortibus es in aro
o nobili demis trux
Vatis in em?
Caus an dux!

Your bias is highly obvious

[gyrbyl.livejournal.com]

I mean come ON, you put the ducks right at the beginning, you're clearly favoring them...

Re: Your bias is highly obvious

[conuly]

I know, I know... *cries*

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

It's late and I shouldn't get into this, but I'm just... well, what I want to know is, what's so awful about having rules? I like English because of its rules. I like British English even better because there are more rules and people follow them more assiduously. One thing I like about learning other languages is figuring out the new rules and how they compare to others that I've learned.

By contrast, most dialects I've encountered... they don't seem to have any rules. Everyone just throws words together and makes up new ones and slurs everything together. That's not fun! That's not pretty! Rules make the language pretty!

Yeah... I'm tired. And descriptivism makes me sad. I'll go now.

[conuly]

You're wrong, though. Every dialect has rules, and if you want I can go hog-wild and start compiling the information to prove it.

I'm not complaining about language having rules, I'm complaining about people being prejudiced against those who speak dialects with different sets of rules.


By contrast, most dialects I've encountered... they don't seem to have any rules. Everyone just throws words together and makes up new ones and slurs everything together. That's not fun! That's not pretty! Rules make the language pretty!

But that's not true! What you ought to do, because it's *really cool* is sit down with lists and lists of information on this dialect or that dialect, and figure out the rules that govern it. Then you'll feel better, and you'll have learned something new, and you'll have done what you like doing anyway (figuring out grammatical rules).

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

I'm confused easily by double-negative usage... I have to do a sort of mathematical positive/negative graph in my head to figure out what the result is supposed to be. Even then, I interpret it incorrectly much of the time, and I dislike the odd sense of mental strain required to parse it all out.

I passed two years of Spanish and a year of French during high school, then historical linguistics during university. None of those classes included the use of double-negatives.

[conuly]

Yeah, but I'm not sure you're the person all these people are thinking about when they say it could be confusing :) Cumae up there maybe, but Moggy? I was still surprised, though, I really expected that anything they thought they had to drill into the heads of little kids couldn't really that be counterintuitive.

You didn't do double negatives in Spanish or French? I remember first year Spanish, we did a lot of remembering how "in spanish, you use multiple negatives", and my mother's always speaking French at me, and talking about the acceptable double negative there. Weird.

[innerbrat]

I don't always get confused: in fact in most cases it's obvious, but on some occasions it has been confusing. It also grates with me. I have to double take when I hear it.

Although I use double negatives to imply a positive. I do it all the time.
"Nobody didn't bring a drink", even "I didn't do nothing".

[conuly]

Although I use double negatives to imply a positive. I do it all the time.

Why? I wouldn't, is all. Is that common in your dialect? *is honestly curious* Do you do anything different with your intonation to distinguish?

(for example, "it's not my fault" would be "I didn't do nothing", and "I did something!" would be "I didn't do nothing. Or "everybody brought a drink" would be "nobody didn't bring a drink" while "nobody brought a drink" would be... actually, that'd be "nobody brought no drinks", wouldn't it? Weird.... *goes back to think*)

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I find double negatives confusing because I don't know if people are using them 'correctly' to mean a positive, or 'incorrectly' to mean a negative. Obviously this problem is increased these days by my extensive exposure to non-native speakers (heck, even US-English speakers) but it was a problem even before then. As for whether or not I'm normally developing with regards language... well you tell me. I didn't speak until I was nearly 3 (having communicated in my own language before then) but launched straight into sentences ("Mummy usually gives me marzipan and icing" being my first words.) My vocabulary was extensive for my age (I think) as evidenced when 3 months later (just shy of 3 years old) I told my mother I was desperate (I was asking for biscuits whilst shopping.) I was reading before I was 4, but then was untaught how to read in school. The next I can recall about reading is having a reading age of 15 from when I was 10 (and since the tests didn't go any higher, I kept testing to RA15 for the next 5-6 years.) So, erm, take my answer as you will.

I can remember having an argument with a Dutch friend over the use of double negatives in English. He finished school top of his year in English, an generally it's impeccable (heck, he's corrected me in the past) but I don't think anyone had ever taught him what governs double negative use in English. Which I think is risky, because whilst there are certain stock phrases where a negative is intended ("I didn't do nothing") in other cases he could construct a double negative which we would take as a positive (right?)

I must admit, the thing I find most confusing isn't strictly a double negative, it's the question "do you mind?" Or more precisely, it's the answer. Because obviously the 'correct' answer is "no, I don't mind" or "yes, I do mind" but people usually just answer no/yes. Which would be fine, if they didn't often answer yes when they mean no. I suppose because it's hard to get your head around no being the positive. But as a result it's often difficult for me to deduce what they mean, and it's not unheard of for me to follow up their answer with "so you mean I can('t) do it?"

But then, this is the girl who had a huge argument with her mother in Estonia (which she says wasn't an argument, it was just me being unreasonably pedantic as always *sighs*) over the fact that the *grass* wasn't yellow. It was covered in yellow leaves. But the grass itself was green. Had she said "the ground is/looks yellow" I'd have been fine, because that was quite true, but she said that the grass was yellow, so I looked expecting that to be the case and it wasn't and I was confused, grr.

Bilingualism seems a popular choice :0)

[deceptica]

You know, I voted "Yes, recently, I *am* a native speaker" on the second question, thinking of double negatives in my native language German. Then I realized that the poll was supposed to be about English. D'oh. :-P I haven't had any problems with double negatives in English so far.

I think part of the whole issue here is that (in my opinion) you are always mixing up two different things. What we refer to as double negative in a language like French for example is not the same as a double negative in German.

In the first sense double negative means that two words are used for one negation. I doubt that a native French speaker thinks ne=no and pas=no. It's just "ne pas"=no.

In German on the other hand we use only one word to negate something, so when there are two words like that in a sentence, it means that things were negated twice and thus make a positive again. (Not that anyone uses that kind of sentence structure on a daily basis, but it's possible.)

I suppose you could say one is a grammatical double negative, and the other is a semantical double negative.

I think the problem with English is that officially it doesn't have a grammatical double negative, so a double negation should always create a positive sentence, but some dialects use it only as a grammatical structure that doesn't change the meaning; so it could really go either way. And I can see how that could be confusing.

I hope that made at least some sense. :-P

[conuly]

Yes, you did, and I'll give a proper reply later.

[queenmargot.livejournal.com]

I said I got confused and am a native speaker, but I'm thinking of typically confusing conversations anyway. Like someone saying, "Didn't you not go?" or something like that, and then someone responding, "No." And then it's all confusing, so it's better to just start the question off in a positive light. And, yes, double negatives used to be the norm in English. It wasn't until the 18th century (I think?), when everything started getting all math-y that someone said, "Ah! Language must be like math! Therefore two negatives=a postive and that's bad!"

French actually developed the double negative. (I'm getting all this from my intro to linguistics course; the professor is a historical linguist.) "Ne" used to be the only word needed to form a negative ("ne" and "pas" go around the verb to negate it, in case you didn't know). Then, they took the phrase "ne marche pas" (I forget why) and for some reason started using the "pas" (which means step) as part of the negative. Voilà! Language change. ;)

[conuly]

Ah, okay. Connie = not the queen of historical linguistics. Actually, historical linguistics = really boring most of the time mihi, so.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Ironically, in my native tongue, it confuses me, but in my second language, it does not. I cannot explain this, but it is so.

I choose cows because you did not have sheep, and this makes me terribly sad, for sheep are fluffy and should be loved by all. (Mmm, wool....)

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

Double negatives in the English language are bad grammar, even if the person hearing/reading it can understand the meaning. If they're not bad grammar in other languages, that doesn't make them good grammar in English.

If a person does not speak English as their first language, or if they have a language-related learning disability, then I will excuse bad grammar. But I will not excuse it coming from a person who has presumably gone through the standard North American school system and does not have a learning difficulty.

My parents use double negatives all the time; I do not. My sister makes spelling and grammatical errors quite frequently; I do not. I don't care if that's how a person's family uses language; if a person has learned proper grammar in school, there is no reason not to use it.

[conuly]

But there *is* no such thing as "bad grammar". I mean, yeah, there is - saying something like "book cat sat-on" is bad grammar, it's completely ungrammatical. But a double negative, in English, isn't bad grammar, it's just a marker of a non-prestigious dialect.

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

Greek uses double negatives. It's slipping my brain as to what Latin does. Oops.

[adiva_calandia]

I suspect Latin does (not that I speak it) because I know Spanish does, and I suspect the other Romance languages do too.

Personally, I do think people should use the correct number of negatives, but I can understand people who use double negatives perfectly well. Not that I know many people who use them, except to portray hicks. . .(sorry).

Have you considered posting this in linguaphiles?

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

If someone uses "sloppy double negative" grammar and I am not taking them seriously, I will take my opportunity to poke fun at them. If I'm feeling particularly annoyed by it, and there's a chance taking it either as a "- and - equals +" I'll use that to my advantage either way I choose. :-p I understand that dialects and other local/cultural/familial language variances occur, but I prefer if people don't stray terribly far from the standard language. To me, it sounds bad, can cause confusion, and is quite annoying in some extremes.

[conuly]

But why do you consider it sloppy? Would you consider Spanish or French to be sloppy? Why do you think that the standard sounds better, or that nonstandards stray from the standard? The latter certainly isn't the case, and if you want I can explain this in detail.

Oh, hell, you talked me into it. Can you tell this is one of my favorite subjects?

Okay. Let's say we have language A... let's just call this Early Modern English.

Early Modern English has several children. Let's name some of them Standard American English, Standard British English, and AAVE (African American Vernacular English).

Now, it's clear that the two standards are brothers, there is no parental relationship. This is despite angry Britons claiming to understand English better than American. It's also equally clear, from the little chart I didn't draw, that AAVE isn't descended from SAE at all - they're siblings to each other. So AAVE (Ebonics, though I loathe the name) doesn't stray from SAE. Instead, they have *both* strayed from Early Modern English.

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

I've been confused by double negatives that were used humorously to confuse. In most speech it's not confusing at all. "I ain't got nothin'" means "I don't have anything"--it's very clear unless you're refusing to see it clearly because you have old-fashioned notions about what's "proper".

People who jump up and down screaming about how "illogical" double negatives are probably don't know much about language, because if they did, they'd know that many, many languages use double negatives in negation. Like Russian, for example:

Nikto ne zvonil = No one didn't call = No one called

[conuly]

1. Yeah, that makes sense. In that case it's not the double negative that's confusing, it's the intent behind it.

2. I know. I keep trying to say that, but... *sighs*

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

When I was very young, I learned how to read at an early age; I learned the "no double negative" rule very quickly. Maybe because of that (because the rule was already firm in my head), I used to have the occasional problem trying to figure out double negatives in text (never in speech). I'd have to take out the two negatives, read the sentence through, put them back in, and see how it was different.

I'm the only one who's chosen chickens so far?! I am appalled.

[conuly]

It's all about the moo-moo, quack-quack.

O sibili si emgo
Fortibus es in aro
o nobili demis trux
Vatis in em?
Caus an dux!

Your bias is highly obvious

[gyrbyl.livejournal.com]

I mean come ON, you put the ducks right at the beginning, you're clearly favoring them...

Re: Your bias is highly obvious

[conuly]

I know, I know... *cries*

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

It's late and I shouldn't get into this, but I'm just... well, what I want to know is, what's so awful about having rules? I like English because of its rules. I like British English even better because there are more rules and people follow them more assiduously. One thing I like about learning other languages is figuring out the new rules and how they compare to others that I've learned.

By contrast, most dialects I've encountered... they don't seem to have any rules. Everyone just throws words together and makes up new ones and slurs everything together. That's not fun! That's not pretty! Rules make the language pretty!

Yeah... I'm tired. And descriptivism makes me sad. I'll go now.

[conuly]

You're wrong, though. Every dialect has rules, and if you want I can go hog-wild and start compiling the information to prove it.

I'm not complaining about language having rules, I'm complaining about people being prejudiced against those who speak dialects with different sets of rules.


By contrast, most dialects I've encountered... they don't seem to have any rules. Everyone just throws words together and makes up new ones and slurs everything together. That's not fun! That's not pretty! Rules make the language pretty!

But that's not true! What you ought to do, because it's *really cool* is sit down with lists and lists of information on this dialect or that dialect, and figure out the rules that govern it. Then you'll feel better, and you'll have learned something new, and you'll have done what you like doing anyway (figuring out grammatical rules).

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

I'm confused easily by double-negative usage... I have to do a sort of mathematical positive/negative graph in my head to figure out what the result is supposed to be. Even then, I interpret it incorrectly much of the time, and I dislike the odd sense of mental strain required to parse it all out.

I passed two years of Spanish and a year of French during high school, then historical linguistics during university. None of those classes included the use of double-negatives.

[conuly]

Yeah, but I'm not sure you're the person all these people are thinking about when they say it could be confusing :) Cumae up there maybe, but Moggy? I was still surprised, though, I really expected that anything they thought they had to drill into the heads of little kids couldn't really that be counterintuitive.

You didn't do double negatives in Spanish or French? I remember first year Spanish, we did a lot of remembering how "in spanish, you use multiple negatives", and my mother's always speaking French at me, and talking about the acceptable double negative there. Weird.

[innerbrat]

I don't always get confused: in fact in most cases it's obvious, but on some occasions it has been confusing. It also grates with me. I have to double take when I hear it.

Although I use double negatives to imply a positive. I do it all the time.
"Nobody didn't bring a drink", even "I didn't do nothing".

[conuly]

Although I use double negatives to imply a positive. I do it all the time.

Why? I wouldn't, is all. Is that common in your dialect? *is honestly curious* Do you do anything different with your intonation to distinguish?

(for example, "it's not my fault" would be "I didn't do nothing", and "I did something!" would be "I didn't do nothing. Or "everybody brought a drink" would be "nobody didn't bring a drink" while "nobody brought a drink" would be... actually, that'd be "nobody brought no drinks", wouldn't it? Weird.... *goes back to think*)

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I find double negatives confusing because I don't know if people are using them 'correctly' to mean a positive, or 'incorrectly' to mean a negative. Obviously this problem is increased these days by my extensive exposure to non-native speakers (heck, even US-English speakers) but it was a problem even before then. As for whether or not I'm normally developing with regards language... well you tell me. I didn't speak until I was nearly 3 (having communicated in my own language before then) but launched straight into sentences ("Mummy usually gives me marzipan and icing" being my first words.) My vocabulary was extensive for my age (I think) as evidenced when 3 months later (just shy of 3 years old) I told my mother I was desperate (I was asking for biscuits whilst shopping.) I was reading before I was 4, but then was untaught how to read in school. The next I can recall about reading is having a reading age of 15 from when I was 10 (and since the tests didn't go any higher, I kept testing to RA15 for the next 5-6 years.) So, erm, take my answer as you will.

I can remember having an argument with a Dutch friend over the use of double negatives in English. He finished school top of his year in English, an generally it's impeccable (heck, he's corrected me in the past) but I don't think anyone had ever taught him what governs double negative use in English. Which I think is risky, because whilst there are certain stock phrases where a negative is intended ("I didn't do nothing") in other cases he could construct a double negative which we would take as a positive (right?)

I must admit, the thing I find most confusing isn't strictly a double negative, it's the question "do you mind?" Or more precisely, it's the answer. Because obviously the 'correct' answer is "no, I don't mind" or "yes, I do mind" but people usually just answer no/yes. Which would be fine, if they didn't often answer yes when they mean no. I suppose because it's hard to get your head around no being the positive. But as a result it's often difficult for me to deduce what they mean, and it's not unheard of for me to follow up their answer with "so you mean I can('t) do it?"

But then, this is the girl who had a huge argument with her mother in Estonia (which she says wasn't an argument, it was just me being unreasonably pedantic as always *sighs*) over the fact that the *grass* wasn't yellow. It was covered in yellow leaves. But the grass itself was green. Had she said "the ground is/looks yellow" I'd have been fine, because that was quite true, but she said that the grass was yellow, so I looked expecting that to be the case and it wasn't and I was confused, grr.

Bilingualism seems a popular choice :0)

[deceptica]

You know, I voted "Yes, recently, I *am* a native speaker" on the second question, thinking of double negatives in my native language German. Then I realized that the poll was supposed to be about English. D'oh. :-P I haven't had any problems with double negatives in English so far.

I think part of the whole issue here is that (in my opinion) you are always mixing up two different things. What we refer to as double negative in a language like French for example is not the same as a double negative in German.

In the first sense double negative means that two words are used for one negation. I doubt that a native French speaker thinks ne=no and pas=no. It's just "ne pas"=no.

In German on the other hand we use only one word to negate something, so when there are two words like that in a sentence, it means that things were negated twice and thus make a positive again. (Not that anyone uses that kind of sentence structure on a daily basis, but it's possible.)

I suppose you could say one is a grammatical double negative, and the other is a semantical double negative.

I think the problem with English is that officially it doesn't have a grammatical double negative, so a double negation should always create a positive sentence, but some dialects use it only as a grammatical structure that doesn't change the meaning; so it could really go either way. And I can see how that could be confusing.

I hope that made at least some sense. :-P

[conuly]

Yes, you did, and I'll give a proper reply later.

[queenmargot.livejournal.com]

I said I got confused and am a native speaker, but I'm thinking of typically confusing conversations anyway. Like someone saying, "Didn't you not go?" or something like that, and then someone responding, "No." And then it's all confusing, so it's better to just start the question off in a positive light. And, yes, double negatives used to be the norm in English. It wasn't until the 18th century (I think?), when everything started getting all math-y that someone said, "Ah! Language must be like math! Therefore two negatives=a postive and that's bad!"

French actually developed the double negative. (I'm getting all this from my intro to linguistics course; the professor is a historical linguist.) "Ne" used to be the only word needed to form a negative ("ne" and "pas" go around the verb to negate it, in case you didn't know). Then, they took the phrase "ne marche pas" (I forget why) and for some reason started using the "pas" (which means step) as part of the negative. Voilà! Language change. ;)

[conuly]

Ah, okay. Connie = not the queen of historical linguistics. Actually, historical linguistics = really boring most of the time mihi, so.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Ironically, in my native tongue, it confuses me, but in my second language, it does not. I cannot explain this, but it is so.

I choose cows because you did not have sheep, and this makes me terribly sad, for sheep are fluffy and should be loved by all. (Mmm, wool....)