Taking descriptivism to a higher level

[nancylebov]

smallship1 is a proud proscriptivist.

I prefer to get outside the system--here's my comment:

Alternate theory: Language keeps changing, but needs to be kept stable enough to be useful.

It's both good and natural to have people pulling in both directions, according to what usages feel plausible to them.

I'm not sure how much language change comes from great writers, how much from slang, and how much from mainstream drift.

Second thought: I'm not sure how much the important resistance to change comes from people who invoke rules and stability and how much is from people who just don't use the changes they don't like.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Many contended rules come from attempting to make English make logical sense, going against what people do naturally. The anti-double negative rule is not natural to English, as shown both by some uses in Shakespeare and by the persistence in Black English. But in MATH, two negatives equal a positive, so must it be in English.

Actually, I don't think that has much to do with it; I think that whole "the negative of a negative is a positive" is just an after-the-fact rationalization that ill-informed prescriptivists came up with to justify a preference they held on other grounds. I don't think they even take it seriously themselves. Because if they did, then the sentence "I never did nothing to nobody" would be acceptable to them—it's a triple negative, and if the negative of a negative is a positive, then the negative of a negative of a negative is the negative of a positive, which is a negative again! But I'm pretty confident that anyone who objected to a double negative would also object to a triple negative.

My take on this is that it's a matter of linguistic styles. Some languages favor maximal consistency throughout a sentence, and so if they negate one thing they negate everything; in the French I was taught, for example, jen'ai jamais rien fait à personne is perfectly grammatical, with its four distinct negations. Other languages favor making the point once and getting it over with, and detest redundancy; present-day formal English is one of them. Negating over and over is bad style in English not because of some specious mathematical argument (not many people could keep careful count of whether a spoken sentence had an odd or an even number of negatives!) but because it's vulgar excess. At least for negation, English is litotic rather than hyperbolic.

[inquisitiveravn.livejournal.com]

I'd say the French version is still a triple negation. The "ne" is not a negation by itself, but is rather the first part of a two part negation. French requires both the "ne" in front of the verb, and another negative term behind it. The default post verb term is "pas" which does not appear in that sentence. What does appear is "jamais" ("never"), "rien" ("nothing"), and "personne"("nobody" or "no one"). Yes, non-Francophones, "personne" means "nobody," not "person" in this context.

Spanish, OTOH, is quite capable of using "no" as the only negation in a sentence, but frequently adds other negative terms with no concern for double negatives. "I never did nothing to nobody" would translate to "(Yo) nunca hice nada a nadie." Note, the pronoun "yo" can be dropped from the sentence and it will still be grammatically correct. Spanish does that a lot.

I vaguely recall that Russian also doesn't have problems with double negatives, but don't feel confident enough with it to attempt a translation.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'd say the French version is still a triple negation. The "ne" is not a negation by itself, but is rather the first part of a two part negation. French requires both the "ne" in front of the verb, and another negative term behind it. The default post verb term is "pas" which does not appear in that sentence. What does appear is "jamais" ("never"), "rien" ("nothing"), and "personne"("nobody" or "no one"). Yes, non-Francophones, "personne" means "nobody," not "person" in this context.

That was true in the French I learned in the 1960s, but it seems not to be true any more; the ne has been dropped as redundant in colloquial French. I remember being perplexed the first time I encountered it, in the film title L'une chante, l'autre pas. In fact, I would say that the standard French negation in the formal French I learned was a double negative, with ne . . . pas being two different negative words, one of which seemingly has now become optional.

Of course, historically, pas was a positive word meaning "a step," inserted for emphasis, just as personne meant "a person" and rien meant "a thing." But that's a purely etymological fact with no relevance to current French usage.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I understand what you're saying, but if that were totally true, then "The experience was not unhelpful" would be considered redundant, but it's not, because taking out the "not" changes (reverses) the meaning. The wordiness is one reason why, for instance, George Orwell really dislikes such utterances, but it's not why "I ain't got no" (a double negative) is considered incorrect.

I probably confused things with Eminem's example, but darn, it's just SO GREAT in its multiplicity of negatives.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

"The experience was not unhelpful" doesn't mean exactly the same thing as "The experience was helpful". The former leaves open the possibility that the experience could have been helpful, but actually didn't make any difference. It might even imply that pretty strongly.

I think I want Lojban.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

People who think you can get a superior language by systematically planning the grammar according to a rigorously defined conceptual scheme strike me as the spiritual kin of people who think you can get a superior economy by having a board of experts make all the important economic decisions. It's just fine if you think you can arrive at a static solution that will be completely and permanently right, but it's seriously suboptimal if you want to leave things open to the dynamic emergence of superior solutions, including solutions to problems we haven't even thought of yet.

I tend to look at natural languages as a vast garden of wild grammars. A little judicious pruning and weeding may be worthwhile, but I don't want anything as formalist as 18th century French landscaping.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I can see your point. The Lojban approach to word roots (randomly picked from existing languages, weighted by number of speakers) especially gets on my nerves.

Still, English isn't especially good at some logical distinctions.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Contrary to both George Orwell and womzilla, I have argued that "I am not unhappy" is indeed different from "I am happy" in useful ways. OTOH, reading passages on standardized tests often are difficult in ways that include a tangled nest of "not"s, so I can see Orwell's point, too. It may just be better to say, "I am neither happy nor unhappy," "I am feeling better but not yet happy," and so on.