[326] in tlhIngan-Hol
RE: Multiple negatives
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon May 18 22:54:03 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 18 May 1992 19:01:00 PDT
In-Reply-To: "BANG%MAPLE.decnet@pine.circa.ufl:edu:Xerox's message of 18 May 92
Larry is quite correct about multiple negatives: they do exist as a matter of
course in many natural languages, including many dialects of English. What our
old English teachers used to tell us about "two negatives making a positive"
was pure prescriptivism (i.e. they were trying to impose arbitrary rules about
how something thinks we OUGHT to speak rather than describing actual speech).
They were trying to make us speak the "standard" dialect of English (a minority
dialect of the powerful and educated), where double and multiple negatives have
become unfashionable.
To justify their "two negatives make a positive" rule, your average English
teacher will appeal to the notation of formal logic, where the NOT-sign,
sometimes written ~, is used to negate a proposition. Thus, if "John loves
Mary" is a proposition, the following is the negation
~ (John loves Mary)
and can be read as "It is not the case that (John loves Mary)." The resulting
statement will be TRUE if and only if (John loves Mary) is FALSE. If you use
two NOT-signs
~ ( ~ (John loves Mary))
then, by the rules of formal logic, this resulting statement is true if and
only if "It is not the case that [it is not the case that (John loves Mary)]",
which is equivalent to just plain old (John loves Mary). So, in formal logic,
~ ( ~ (John loves Mary)) = (John loves Mary)
or, two logical negatives DO make a positive.
The problem is that the "negative" verbs, adverbs and particles in natural
language often do not translate directly into the negatives of formal
logic--rather they are often nothing more than intensifiers of the negation.
French routinely requires two negative-like words:
Je ne vous aime pas.
I not you love not (I don't love you)
Je ne vous aimerai jamais.
I not you will-love never. (I will never love you)
Personne ne m'aime.
Nobody not me love. (Nobody loves me)
Je ne sais rien.
I not know nothing. (I don't know anything)
Of course, "I don't know nothing" in many perfectly good (but unfashionable)
dialects of English is intended to mean, and is understood to mean "I don't
know anything," just like in French. When a sentence with multiple negatives
is intended to be negative, and is understood to be negative, then it IS
negative. There is no other metric for meaning.
Spanish and Portuguese also use multiple negatives:
No se' nada.
Na~o sei nada.
Not I-know nothing. (I don't know anything.)
Na~o dou nada a ninquem.
Not I-give nothing to nobody. (I don't give anything to anybody.)
My favorite example, however, comes from the English of Chaucer (14th century).
The narrator (Chaucer himself) says the following of the "parfit [perfect]
gentle knight" (I'm a little unsure of the spelling, but I think I've got all
the words right)
He nevere yet no vilanye ne seyde in al his lyfe unto no manner wight.
He never yet no boorishness not said in all his life to no manner of person.
(He never said anything crude, in all his life, to any kind of person.)
That's 4 in the same sentence, and the negatives just intensify rather than
cancel each other out. And, of course, many English dialects continue to work
the same way.
Klingon may or may not have multiple negatives. The only way to find out is to
question an informant--arguments from formal logic simply do not apply to
natural languages.
Ken Beesley
