On 06/12/2015 07:48 AM, Chris wrote:
>
> The same goes for "ain't". There's no reason why "ain't" should be "bad
> English". "I ain't got no money" is perfectly fine, although it might
> make the odd Oxbridge fellow cringe and spill his tea. But what the
> Dickens, old chap!

Yea, I'm fine with "ain't" being considered an actual word. Years ago, I used to hear a lot of "'Ain't' isn't a real word", but meh, it's used as a word, even the people who don't like it still know full-well exactly what it means, so...I ain't got a big problem with it :)

But there was one particular argument in favor of "ain't" that I never liked: "It's a contraction for 'are not'."

Well, no, it isn't a contraction for "are not" (maybe it originally was, I dunno). Because "I ain't going" vs "I are not going." So no, it may be a word, but it ain't a contraction for "are not".

On 06/12/2015 03:58 PM, "Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQi?= <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Friday, 12 June 2015 at 19:16:39 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Banned in the US: "Public Image Limited - This Is Not A Love Song" and
>> "SABRINA - Boys (Video Original) - HD."
>
> Banned? Oh well, Lydon of Sex Pistols is an anarchist and Sabrina shows
> of her tits with a wardrobe malfunction. I guess that explains it well
> enough.

Well, "banned", "blocked by youtube for copyright reasons", whatever ;)

On 6/13/2015 3:32 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:

>> "My friend came in to the shop today and the entire time they just
>> kept asking for corks..."
>
> For me that sounds 100% fine...

Not to me. Gender-neutrality is for the cases when the gender is unknown or the subject is generic, e.g. "A person". I would assume that you are likely to know the gender of a friend, in which case 'they' makes no sense here.

When I used to play Dark Age of Camelot, there was one line of text that annoyed me to no end. Anytime someone summoned their horse, you would see a message like this:

"Dougal mounts their horse."

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

On Saturday, 13 June 2015 at 01:09:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On 6/13/2015 3:32 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> Not to me. Gender-neutrality is for the cases when the gender is unknown or the subject is generic, e.g. "A person". I would assume that you are likely to know the gender of a friend, in which case 'they' makes no sense here.
>
> When I used to play Dark Age of Camelot, there was one line of text that annoyed me to no end. Anytime someone summoned their horse, you would see a message like this:
>
> "Dougal mounts their horse."
>
> Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Actually I think it matters more if the person you are talking to knows the gender of the person you are talking about, in the shop sentence the gender of the friend is unknown to the person you are talking to so "they" still works.

I suppose the Dark Age of Camelot line doesn't make sense because you as the listener know the gender of Dougal, though honestly it still sounds fine to me because I am not really sure if Dougal is supposed to be male or female.

On 6/13/2015 10:26 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:

>
> Actually I think it matters more if the person you are talking to knows
> the gender of the person you are talking about, in the shop sentence the
> gender of the friend is unknown to the person you are talking to so
> "they" still works.

So then, use the gender-specific pronoun and the listener is no longer in the dark! What the listener knows or doesn't know doesn't play into it in this case. 'My friend' is a specific person, and specific people have a gender. Someone, anyone, a person, a human, etc... are all generic, so the gender is always unknown to the speaker.

On 12/06/2015 12:48 PM, Chris wrote:
> "man" is still used as a gender neutral pronoun in German, however, for
> some reason it's frowned upon these days, just like "one" in English.
> It's considered "arrogant" and old fashioned, but it's effin useful and
> solves a lot of problems.
>
> Mind you, decisions made by those who compile dictionaries and
> "standards" are not at all based on the reality of a given language.
> Double negation exists in English (and many other languages), but it's
> stigmati(s|z)ed as being "incorrect". The vote was 5 to 4 when this
> decision was made in England. The official reasoning behind it was that
> minus + minus = plus, i.e. "I don't have no money" would mean "I do have
> money", which is complete horsesh*t. Of course it means "I don't have
> money". The real reason, of course, was class snobbery and elitism:
> double negation was and still is commonly used in working class English
> in England (and the US, I think). Ironically enough, double negation is
> obligatory in standard French, while it is not used in colloquial
> French. This shows you how arbitrary these standards are. Don't take
> them too seriously, and don't start religious wars about some eggheads'
> decisions ;)
>
> The same goes for "ain't". There's no reason why "ain't" should be "bad
> English". "I ain't got no money" is perfectly fine, although it might
> make the odd Oxbridge fellow cringe and spill his tea. But what the
> Dickens, old chap!

I must be rare, cos I ain't posh n' well educated but I deplore the use of double negatives in English. I might be heard t'say "I ain't got n' money" (cos it be true) but in that case the "n'" is the local dialect contraction of "any". Other areas of the UK can't use the same excuse, maybe they got it from us but didn't understand what we were say'n, which is very common, but am more inclined to blame ignorance.

Don't know anything about double negative usage in French, but I do know that they are a way making super polite requests in Japanese.

Lets all not not stop arguing the minutia.

A...

On 12/06/2015 10:37 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Yea, I'm fine with "ain't" being considered an actual word. Years ago, I
> used to hear a lot of "'Ain't' isn't a real word", but meh, it's used as
> a word, even the people who don't like it still know full-well exactly
> what it means, so...I ain't got a big problem with it :)
>
> But there was one particular argument in favor of "ain't" that I never
> liked: "It's a contraction for 'are not'."
>
> Well, no, it isn't a contraction for "are not" (maybe it originally was,
> I dunno). Because "I ain't going" vs "I are not going." So no, it may be
> a word, but it ain't a contraction for "are not".

It is a contraction of "are not" because it originates from a time/dialect where the verb to-be was conjugated differently than today's English. Many of the irregularities of to-be are ignored in international English which gives rise to dialects among ESL speakers that sound wrong but endearing (at least to my ears).

A...

On Sunday, 14 June 2015 at 09:38:02 UTC, Alix Pexton wrote:
> On 12/06/2015 12:48 PM, Chris wrote:
>> "man" is still used as a gender neutral pronoun in German, however, for
>> some reason it's frowned upon these days, just like "one" in English.
>> It's considered "arrogant" and old fashioned, but it's effin useful and
>> solves a lot of problems.
>>
>> Mind you, decisions made by those who compile dictionaries and
>> "standards" are not at all based on the reality of a given language.
>> Double negation exists in English (and many other languages), but it's
>> stigmati(s|z)ed as being "incorrect". The vote was 5 to 4 when this
>> decision was made in England. The official reasoning behind it was that
>> minus + minus = plus, i.e. "I don't have no money" would mean "I do have
>> money", which is complete horsesh*t. Of course it means "I don't have
>> money". The real reason, of course, was class snobbery and elitism:
>> double negation was and still is commonly used in working class English
>> in England (and the US, I think). Ironically enough, double negation is
>> obligatory in standard French, while it is not used in colloquial
>> French. This shows you how arbitrary these standards are. Don't take
>> them too seriously, and don't start religious wars about some eggheads'
>> decisions ;)
>>
>> The same goes for "ain't". There's no reason why "ain't" should be "bad
>> English". "I ain't got no money" is perfectly fine, although it might
>> make the odd Oxbridge fellow cringe and spill his tea. But what the
>> Dickens, old chap!
>
> I must be rare, cos I ain't posh n' well educated but I deplore the use of double negatives in English. I might be heard t'say "I ain't got n' money" (cos it be true) but in that case the "n'" is the local dialect contraction of "any". Other areas of the UK can't use the same excuse, maybe they got it from us but didn't understand what we were say'n, which is very common, but am more inclined to blame ignorance.
>
> Don't know anything about double negative usage in French, but I do know that they are a way making super polite requests in Japanese.
>
> Lets all not not stop arguing the minutia.
>
> A...

Then generations of music fans were baffled by lyrics like "I ain't got no money to show" (Double trouble), "I can't get no satisfaction". To use "any" ain't no better, because it still is a double negative. I'll give you Pinker's explanation:

"At this point, defenders of the standard are likely to pull out the notorious  double negative, as in I can't get no satisfaction. Logically speaking, the two negatives cancel each other out,
they teach; Mr. Jagger is actually saying that he is satisfied. The song should be entitled "I Can't Get Any Satisfaction." But this reasoning is not satisfactory. Hundreds of languages require their speakers to use a negative element somewhere within the "scope," as linguists call it, of a negated verb.

The so-called double negative, far from being a corruption, was
the norm in Chaucer's Middle English, and negation in standard French—as in Je ne sais pas, where ne and pas
are both negative—is a familiar contemporary example.
Come to think of it, Standard English is really no different. What do any, even, and at all mean in the following sentences?

I didn't buy any lottery tickets.
I didn't eat even a single French fry.
I didn't eat fried food at all today.

Clearly, not much: you can't use them alone, as the following strange sentences show:

I bought any lottery tickets.
I ate even a single French fry.
I ate fried food at all today.

What these words are doing is exactly what no is doing in nonstandard American English, such as in the equivalent
I didn't buy no lottery tickets—agreeing with the negated verb. The slim difference is that nonstandard English co-opted the word no as the agreement element,  whereas Standard English co-opted the word any ; aside from that, they are pretty much
translations. And one more point has to be made. In the grammar of standard English, a double negative does
not assert the corresponding affirmative. No one would dream of saying  I can't get no satisfaction out of the blue to boast that he easily attains contentment. There are circumstances in which one might use the construction to deny a preceding
negation in the discourse, but denying a negation is not the same as asserting an affirmative, and even then one could probably only use it by putting heavy stress on the negative
element, as in the following contrived example:

As hard as I try not to be smug about the misfortunes of my adversaries, I must admit that I can't get no satisfaction out of his tenure denial.

So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead to confusion is pure pedantry."

http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~sih01001/english/fall2007/TheLanguageMavens.pdf

On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 08:54:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
> So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead to confusion is pure pedantry."

Yes, indeed.

Much of the difficulty with discussions of language in the modern world comes from not making a distinction between its denotative and connotative aspects.  The former relates to what is actually being said, and the latter to all the other thoughts and impressions that are evoked by saying it in that way.

Modern people emphasize excessively the denotative aspects, whereas connotations do matter since - as the neuroscience tells us - there are subtle priming effects and there are consequences from shifting the brain into different modes.

That's perhaps also in part why people do care about syntax in computer languages, even though at one level anything precise might be felt to do the job.

Back to your point, many non-Western cultures have different kinds of speech according to the social context.  That's because wanting to do so is a human group thing, not a DWEM thing.  Of course in the past years there was a relaxation of standards of formality due to concerns over it creating a noxious and unwarranted exclusivity.  That may have been a good thing in some ways.  But I think every human group will ultimately need to retain distinctions between different registers of speaking and writing...

On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 16:34:59 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 08:54:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead to confusion is pure pedantry."
>
> Yes, indeed.
>
> Much of the difficulty with discussions of language in the modern world comes from not making a distinction between its denotative and connotative aspects.  The former relates to what is actually being said, and the latter to all the other thoughts and impressions that are evoked by saying it in that way.
>
> Modern people emphasize excessively the denotative aspects, whereas connotations do matter since - as the neuroscience tells us - there are subtle priming effects and there are consequences from shifting the brain into different modes.
>
> That's perhaps also in part why people do care about syntax in computer languages, even though at one level anything precise might be felt to do the job.
>
> Back to your point, many non-Western cultures have different kinds of speech according to the social context.  That's because wanting to do so is a human group thing, not a DWEM thing.  Of course in the past years there was a relaxation of standards of formality due to concerns over it creating a noxious and unwarranted exclusivity.  That may have been a good thing in some ways.  But I think every human group will ultimately need to retain distinctions between different registers of speaking and writing...

My point was not so much formal vs non-formal speech but the fact that a lot of these decisions are linguistically (not socially) arbitrary, often counter intuitive, and made by people who want to draw a line between their own (privileged) group and others they do not deem worthy of the same privileges. Again in the words of Pinker:

"Perhaps most importantly, since prepscriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble."

I couldn't put it better myself. There's no linguistic reason why double negatives shouldn't be in the standard varieties of English. (Greek logic != linguistic logic)