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

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

It could be because I never heard double-negatives used until I was a teenager, and even then only on television. People where I live tend to not use them; my mother sometimes does, but she spent a few years in Arkansas as a kid, where it is probably far more common.

Or it could be my wildly uneven language parsing ability, which deserves a whole post of its own. It handles English as a foreign language, with the same multiple levels of translation required, so it might make sense that I have trouble with language forms in the same way that a non-native speaker would. :-)

Spanish was usually taught with just adding a "no" at one key point (i.e. no se habla for a simplified example). I can't remember French as well, aside from that it was similar to Spanish with slightly different vocabulary.

[conuly]

Well, never hearing it could definitely affect comprehension, as could linguistic issues (naturally). Figuring out the cause would be... kinda boring, actually, and a bit pointless.

As for Spanish... now I have to get out my spanish language books, see what they do. Gah, more work, more work. :) I love this sort of thing.