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

[eofs.livejournal.com]

So if I could get people in my town to start saying "book cat sat-on" you'd then consider it valid? I'm genuinely curious.

[conuly]

Interesting question. If they were consistent with this structure, and it's rule-based... sure, why not? Other languages have really odd grammars too.

Of course, I could be snarky and ask you to do so first.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

But it wouldn't be rule based. And I'm not so sure that other dialectical constructions are.

Of course, I come from an area where "ey up me duhck" (hey up my duck) means hello so... ;0)

Other languages have really odd grammars too.

You can say that again. I just spent four months living in Finland. Finnish conjugates no, declines names, lacks articles (both definite and indefinite), has no gender at all (ie he and she are the same) and has no future tense. A far cry from the English and French grammar I've learnt the rest of my life.

Unfortunately I'm not inclined to convince the 60 000 population (plus 20k students from round the country/world) so we'll never find out.

[conuly]

Why wouldn't it be rule based? All I can say is what I've had drilled into me for the past few years - all dialects, all languages, have rules. Except pidgins, but they don't count.