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Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

'"I ne saugh nawiht" in Middle English; "I don't see anything" in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently "ignorant" or "stupid" about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.'

There is nothing inherently English about Greek and a number of Slavic languages. There ain't nothing much that Afrikaans tells us about the practice of Modern English (is there, baas?) and only so much light that Middle English sheds.

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As a native speaker of a Slavic language who has studied English and currently attempts to learn French I find this entire premise a little baffling.

Typically, a Slavic speaker who has just begun learning English tries to make a linguistic calque and says "I don't see nothing". The teachers would then repeatedly make the point that "there is no double negation in English and you must use 'any' in that case".

Similarly, the use of 'ne' in French is more nuanced. Used alone, it may not convey any negative meaning at all (ne explétif) except when paired with just seven verbs (ne littéraire). I would not therefore call 'ne .. pas' a 'double negative'. A double negative would be "Ce n'est pas rien" which works the same way as 'I do not disagree' in English. This does not reinforce the negative meaning like in Slavic languages but resolves to a positive instead. In addition, in spoken informal French the 'ne' is often dropped and 'pas' is the only indicative of negation (e.g Je sais pas).

The article then goes off on some weird tangent on how patriarchal society feels threatened by the linguistic innovations of the teenage slang. I don't even know.

The point the author is making that language is a convention and that different languages (and older versions of the same language) may use different conventions. Using a non-standard convention thus is no reason to infer ignorance or stupidity. Non-standard speech in and of itself only tells us that the speaker is preferring unconventional English to conventional English; this may be for a number of reasons, such as a perceived stiffness of dictionary English or its inability to capture nuances or elements of communication important to the speaker.

Related is Max Weinreich's quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (or, in the original Yiddish: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot").

Double negation is also a feature of modern English; the point is no one can claim speakers of Middle English, French, Afrikaans et cetera are ignorant or unintelligent.

Right--although the only speakers of Middle English that I've actually met were reading Chaucer out loud in a college class. So we've got it out of the way about them being ignorant or unintelligent.

I don't judge any particular speaker of French or Afrikaans to be ignorant or unintelligent. I do however judge that while they are speaking French or Afrikaans they are not speaking English.

I have a sore memory of a recent lengthy debate on the concept of dialects, so suffice it here to say: It is utterly uncontroversial among linguists that AAVE, among other dialects which use double negation for emphasis, is a real English that young black kids grow up and learn to speak properly. It is not Standard in the sense that it is not used in news or government, and its use in formal speech will leave one branded ignorant, but it is in all other respects the relative equal of the English you speak.

If you have criticisms, that's fine, but again, this is the scientific consensus and not my area of expertise-- I'll have to direct you to Wikipedia.

I'm pretty ignorant about linguists, so, honest question: if AAVE is considered "equal" to Standard English, why is it called a vernacular?

It's a fuzzy line-- the old adage "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is more or less accurate. If you're the official language of a country or religion, or are used extensively in business or politics, you get to be "Standard". If you're only spoken by a sub-national cultural group, or appear only in "informal" media and popular culture, you're just a dialect. The distinction itself actually is controversial, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(linguistics)

Not that there's anything wrong with having a standard language for business or politics, as long as you don't think that says something about people who grew up in the wrong place or class.

I think I get all that. So is there room for the idea of a vernacular that is not a "real English", to use your term? Or not the "relative equal" of Standard English? Can there be, or are there in the wild, vernaculars that are something other than these things?

Absolutely, and I would take jargons as an example. American Legal English is a kind of English, but it's not "real" in the sense that there are ideas in English that it can't properly express, and vice versa, and even skilled legal practitioners frequently make inconsistent mistakes. This is predicted by the fact that it is learned in adulthood; the language has no native speakers. Conversely, among languages spoken from birth, we expect and find that they are internally consistent and of roughly equivalent expressive value.

No, but it's disingenuous to claim people who consider the speaker to be ignorant are only taking into account the double-negation, when the phrase contains a combination of multiple factors, such as language and content.

That is very much the point, I think. You can't judge the speech negatively on its merits, since emphatic negation is a regular feature of many languages. You can judge the speech negatively on the basis of who you think the person is, in this case "black".

There are some obvious issues with confusing these things.

You can't judge the speech negatively on its merits, since emphatic negation is a regular feature of many languages.

But the speech isn't in "many languages", it's in a particular language where the double-negation is considered incorrect, therefore there's no need to make assumptions about race or background to consider the speaker ignorant.

Emphatic double negation is not considered incorrect in African American English or other English dialects where it appears. It is used regularly and correctly, which is no surprise since it is a feature of many languages. The reason it is called incorrect is because these are historically the dialects of impoverished and oppressed groups. This is, again, the point and the problem.

The speech is correct.

How do you know the speaker is talking in AAVE and not just broken English?

Academically speaking, that is a matter of some debate. Pragmatically speaking, it's easy-- are they speaking the language they grew up speaking? Then it's correct. What you call "broken English", assuming native speakers, are just poor (i.e. impoverished) dialects.

To be clear on what I'm saying, an AAVE speaker can attempt to speak some other dialect and fail, producing broken constructions similar to non-native speech. But almost none of the speech labeled as such falls into that category.

I'd like to point out that as far as I'm aware modern French speakers rarely use ne pas and favour simply using pas to indicate a negative.

Not to mean that says anything about double negatives, but French probably shouldn't be used as an example of them.

Thanks for the note! Although I don't think it makes it a bad example, there's no requirement that a double construction always be used in order to count. It being perceived as correct when used is enough.

But modern English does have significant French roots.

Like in Stoicism, nothing is inherently good or bad (non-descriptives) about things in and of themselves.

Like, this point isn't new... Why it is rejected with different rates across scientific disciplines is entertaining.

Humans are entertaining when they look intellectually surprised.

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