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Comment by eroded | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_%28linguistics%29

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.

Be interesting to do a corpus study on this.

How do you do a corpus study on stress? Audio/Video, I guess.

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.

Do you read French? As the article explains, the structure is identical. There is no ambiguity.

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.

It was a little strong of me to say that the structures are identical. They are comparable.

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?

Only English language is logical, it's known. I mean, just look at the spelling...

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