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?

[conuly]

Well, all the Romance languages, afaik, use double negatives.

[conuly]

I was planning on it, originally, but since then I've gotten so worked up on the subject that I really don't need *more* drama. Many of the linguaphiles are prescriptivists.

And, of course, I eschew prescriptivist linguistics as the tool of the oppressor (13).

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

That would make sense. Why I remembered Greek does and forgot about Latin is beyond me. :-P

[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.

[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]

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.

[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...

[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.

[azuresunglasses.livejournal.com]

It's sloppy because the rules of modern English state double negatives are a no-no. It's a simple rule.
Spanish and French have the grammar of double negatives, it is part of the native grammar to do that.
By all means, let people speak the way they were raised to speak. However, different dialects and different grammatical allowances within those dialects are not reason to change the grammatical rules for the standard of the language.
Most people do not routinely use double negatives.

[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).

[conuly]

But the rules of Modern English *don't* state that! Ask any linguist.

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.

[conuly]

Oh yeah, and what makes it sloppy? That makes it, at most, ungrammatical (though the reality is that it's merely non-prestigious), but not *sloppy*.

Re: Your bias is highly obvious

[conuly]

I know, I know... *cries*

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

Usually the offending person who is using the "sloppy double negative" normally does speak in "proper standard English," and sometimes it grates on my nerves when they're being "lazy" about it or purposely annoying me with it when I'm not in a pleasant mood. I'm normally not going to pick on others for it unless I'm feeling particularly annoyed by them with this and other things.

"Don't go nowhere!" OK, so I want to get out of here because they are bugging me...so I WON'T "go nowhere".... *grin*

Nah, usually I only poke fun if they're being silly or (on the above example) they're bugging the crap out of me. ;-)

[conuly]

Ah, okay :)

Like I make fun of Lizziey's code-switching, I guess. In reality, I admire the skill.

[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.

[conuly]

Actually, that's a vaguely insulting comment. Sorry.

Re: Your bias is highly obvious

[gyrbyl.livejournal.com]

Aww... don't cry. *Hands you a glacier* (You'll be ahead of everybody else next ice-age...)

[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.