I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics, I don't understand the resistance to double negatives in "proper" English. The "ain't got none" construct exists in many other languages. The double negative reinforces each other, instead of canceling each other out.
You have to define what you mean by "Ebonics". The term is awful... :-)
According to the article's definition it doesn't sound like a crock at all. When a young person writes Spanish words and grammar in an English essay, sane people don't assume a degraded intelligence. We realize that this person is a native Spanish speaker. They are probably reasonably intelligent, but ignorant of certain normative rules of English and when and where a particular language/vocabulary is appropriate.
That all Ebonics is -- not unlimited acceptance of non-normative english in the wrong contexts, or teaching people to write with black slang (unless that's part of the point of essay). The whole point is to teach kids who speak a different dialect to code switch when writing, for example. These students are wrong to use certain verbal constructions in (formal) written english, but it's the language in a particular context that is wrong -- not the language itself.
Wow, I'm a bit disappointed in the HN community here. There are a lot of <i>idées reçues</i>[1] that seem to come up over and over again (anti-homeopathy being one, not that I'm pro-homeopathy, so don't get off-topic over it). But this whole anti-Ebonics is new to me (in this community), especially after the OP explained it in such understandable terms.
Secondly, the whole interpretation of "double negatives" as being logically equivalent to (not(not TRUE)) is quite unfortunate. When languages use double negatives, it just means that that language expresses a negative using 2 helper words in separate parts of the sentence. It's a pattern for expressing a single negative, not a formula that doubles (or cancels) the negative.
Luckily, I can understand where programmers are coming from, that they're using their "native" languages, and that we can help them understand that those languages aren't appropriate in other contexts :-)
No, this doesn't fit: Being opposed to homeopathy isn't an "automatic thought or platitude" and it certainly isn't "self-contradictory". It's an acknowledgement of basic science. Grouping it in with the kinds of thoughts "idées reçues" was intended to refer to makes the term entirely meaningless.
And, since we're talking about language, this is entirely on-topic. ;)
You proved my point: needing to counter homeopathy every single time it (or something vaguely similar, such as anti-vax--and yes, that is bait) is mentioned off-hand is automatic thought. I didn't bring up homeopathy with arguments for or against, I brought it up as an example of what happens to discussions, I discouraged people from discussing the merits of it, yet you still do.
A good translation of "idées reçues" would be "a mild case of groupthink" (while recognizing that homoeopathy itself is a product of more serious groupthink). It's not a judgement about the content but an observation about the behavior I see on HN. I think it's totally possible to have automatic thoughts that are scientifically sound, but they can still be automatic (or "idées reçues") if they come more from unanalyzed peer statements and wanting to fit in than from self-driven analysis.
You're misunderstanding me: I'm not countering homeopathy, I'm countering your complete misunderstanding of the fancy French phrase you insist on throwing around.
There's some research[1] that suggests that some dialects of Old English used double negation reliably, but that this got phased out in 'proper' Middle English.
It's interesting that double negation is standard in French, but not used in Germanic languages. In this case, it seems like the Germanic influences on English won.
In this case, those attempting to standardize English grammar decided double negation should be used to achieve subtle shades of positive (as in Italian) rather than negative emphasis (as in Catalan) so double negatives are not conveying nothing (unlike in French or Castilian where the standard extra negative no comunica nada). Perhaps the divergence between the Romance languages is more immediately surprising...
What's interesting is that normal use of negation seems to have changed over time within many individual languages, repeatedly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
which is perhaps part of the reason why the AAVE double negative has so many parallels in British regional dialects and the writings of Chaucer
Double negatives are recommended in proper french, but using only the first negation is actually grammatically correct(ex: je ne sais pas -> je ne sais) and keeping the second negation only is usual in casual speak (Je ne sais pas -> Je sais pas).
I always thought double negatives were a waste of time and ink, but come to think of it this kind of redundancy seems optimized for quick parsing. There is more effort on the speaker for building coherent sentences, but it's easier to catch the speaker's intent even if some parts got lost or couldn't be understood.
I thinks person marking on verbs and use of articles is waste, who needs? Also, "have seen" is redundant because of "have", "have see" is better. Also, "is" redundant, many language does without. Without better.
Language is full of redundancy. Because it's a constantly evolving, very complex system of rules, it never reaches a state in which every grammatical sentence has an optimal balance between economy and expressiveness.
I found myself nodding at the explanations of the grammer given in the article. I've never deeply thought of AAVE as a language, more of a corruption (which is a natural part of how living languages grow and evolve), but the article gives some depth to the discussion.
At the very least it's worth a read through to help you make your own decisions about the structure of this language. Although I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure, I believe this is somewhat of a liberty taken by the author. I've heard many variations on AAVE grammar working at college tech support, and my ability to understand the grammar being used fluctuates from person to person. This isn't a single cohesive language; it's much more ad hoc than that in my personal experience, even in a small geographic region.
"I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure"
That doesn't mean much. Mainstream speakers of standard English also use a variety of grammatical structures. Some speakers of standard English will even argue till they're blue in the face that certain grammatical structures are wrong, wrong, wrong even after you show them examples from Dickens, Twain, Hemmingway et al.
As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.
This is the problem with being a "programmer" with no domain. This is sort of like the one true programming language debate ("blub") where people want to evaluate mathematical notation as to their qualitative worth completely devoid of any context.
Computer languages are not spoken languages. No one should accuse English of being "illogical" because it's redundant. It isn't as terse as mathematical notation because most people don't speak completely in mathematical notation.
And it's all very logical, actually -- just not in the way you might expect. You might want to look into the effects of redundancy on transmission errors in communications before you pass judgement. :-)
A double negative is not double negation (in other languages), it's called agreement[1]. Just like you have to have agreement between numbers in English (It is / They are) you can also have languages that require/support agreement in terms of negative/positive. Yes, it's redundant information, but all human languages have a lot of extra information built into them at every level to make them easier to use.
My intuition is that double negation in English is usually accompanied by a shift in stress to emphasize that the negation should be interpreted in the "correct" way (i.e., as negating a previous negation) rather than as mere agreement. I think English actually allows multiple negation with no significant change in semantics in many dialects, possibly as the default interpretation.
Think of the AAVE negation, not as an operator, but as a tense. It's like in Standard English when you change a sentence from singular to plural, or from first-person to third-person: several words are required to change in lockstep or else the sentence isn't grammatical. Negation in AAVE works like that.
You obviously didn't make it to the end of the article, where it's explained that numerous Francophones wrote into dispute the author's interpretation and the author admitted his understanding of French was fundamentally flawed. As a French-speaker myself, encountering obvious bullshit at the beginning of the article made it difficult to uncritically accept his assertions for the remaining pages.
That note at the end also made it clear that the mistakes were corrected. Did you read the first part, get upset, then reload and read the note at the end?
Yes, the double-negative construct exists in other languages. It doesn't exist in English. You may as well be asking why people insist other people use English words instead of German words when talking to them.
He most certainly did not speak modern English, which is the English we're talking about.
> Students of English language and literature will also know that, had you lived in England up to the 17th century, you’d also have been doubling your negatives with gay abandon and not incurring the wrath of the grammar police.
The key part here is "up to the 17th century". If you had bothered to continue reading, you would have seen
> After the 17th century, certain writers attempted to make English spelling and grammar more systematic, and relate the rules of language to those of logic.
followed by
> Double negatives, when used to express a negative idea, aren’t acceptable in standard English
Shakespeare most certainly did speak, and write, Modern English. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_English . If your claim is that he did not speak an identical dialect to you, well, neither do many English speakers who use double negatives for emphasis (or because they are grammatically required) every day.
This is ludicrous. The language spoken by Shakespeare was undoubtedly and clearly different from anything regularly spoken today, and nearly unintelligible to any English speaker without an interest in Shakespeare or older forms of English. If that is not a different language, then what objective basis do you have for saying that AAVE is a different language?
To be clear, Shakespeare did not speak American Standard English (or any dialect of English currently spoken). However, as I replied to your sibling, the English that he spoke is not more different from ASE than many other dialects of modern English, and is much closer than some. (Where it differed is primarily in orthography, as the last thing to be standardized in English was spelling, which makes the difference when reading text seem much greater.)
As noted elsewhere in these comments, the distinction between a language and a dialect is primarily a political one (and some linguists reject it entirely). However, there is a clear line between between Middle English and Modern English which does not exist between Elizabethan and American Standard, and that's why I say the original claim is false.
If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.
I said "modern English", not "Modern English". The fact that Wikipedia defines a term "Modern English" to mean English spoken since ~1550 is quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Wikipedia, referencing the science of linguistics. And it ain't a scare capital, they call it Modern because it is. English spoken since the Great Vowel Shift does not differ from English spoken today any more than dialects of English spoken today differ from each other.
If you want to claim that Shakespeare did not speak modern English, capitalized or non, you will need to specify exactly what you think you mean, because the statement as written is just not true.
The entire context of this discussion is a concrete example of how the language spoken by Shakespeare does in fact differ from the standard English spoken today. But instead of recognizing this fact, you are trying to turn this argument into one over the meaning of the term "modern english", which is completely pointless.
> If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.
The point of this entire thread is that what you are calling "standard English" is not a thing. It's not what Shakespeare spoke and it's not what we speak. There is American Standard, the dialect primarily spoken on the news in the US and elsewhere, but that is one of dozens. Many of those, including the Elizabethan spoken by Shakespeare and ethnolects spoken my many millions of people today, employ double negatives for emphasis. You are trying to draw an old/new distinction which does not reflect reality.
