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.
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 :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Received_Ideas: "automatic thoughts and platitudes, self-contradictory and insipid"
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. ;)
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.
I was under the impression that modern linguists generally agreed that good linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Could you elaborate here?
A lot of this discussion is a complete embarrassment, I expected better from HN :(
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.
[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-11-08/features/06110...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_%28linguistics%29
Be interesting to do a corpus study on this.
"Interesting, now try it without the quadruple negative." -- Amy
Are you insisting Shakespeare didn't speak English?
> I never was nor never will be.
-- Richard III
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.