Question, question or two...
Dec. 28th, 2004 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 01:29 am (UTC)However, different dialects and different grammatical allowances within those dialects are not reason to change the grammatical rules for the standard of the language.
Why not?
Most people do not routinely use double negatives.
Can you prove that? No, really, can you? That'd be cool.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 04:17 pm (UTC)What would it be like to live in a world where schoolchildren were taught that "I ain't got no oranges," was the best was to communicate one's lack of orange-colored delicious fruit?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 04:30 pm (UTC)About the same as the living in the world we're in right now, except people would say that "don't have any" was uneducated. It's the same problem. The *intelligent* solution is to get rid of that idea of "right" and "wrong". There's no logic behind it. It's rather like saying "gay marriage is wrong because it's unnatural, and we shouldn't change the laws to suit a minority, and what would the world be like if kids were taught it's all right to kiss people of the same sex!".
Note, for the impaired, I don't *actually* think that this is on the same scale. I do, however, think that this is the same basic problem at the core, one of... well, the status quo. And you know what I think about *that* by now.