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

[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.