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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

Cool link. It's interesting to see that it seems to be a dialect that is not based on geography, but based on race and income.

On a side note, as a non native English speaker, the double negative always sounds really awful to me :) You can call it dialect all you want, it just doesn't make any sense.

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You should re-read the essay, which spends considerable time on the double negative. Ironically, not speaking English might make a reader more comfortable with double-negatives, which are, for instance, a feature of mainstream Italian.

French too, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a language more stuffy or proscriptive. How many languages have a 400-year-old state-sponsored committee whose sole purpose is to guide the language?

It's amazing how difficult it is for people to get past the trap of thinking that what's familiar is "correct."

I don't want to call these usages in any of AAVE, French or Italian (the ones I've seen usage of) double negatives. They're doubly marked, but it's just one negative.

Lots of languages use multiple negative words to reinforce the negative meaning. Whether it makes sense depends on whether you interpret words like "not" as Boolean operators that "toggle" a binary value or whether you see them as indicators of a negative state that reinforce each other to serve as indicators of intensity or certainty. Since "standard" Engliah doesn't use "double negatives" anyway I feel it's more of a clever overloading than a logical paradox.

With all other words relating to absence of negation English uses the "binary toggle" interpretation (which is only binary as long as the described concept is binary). For example "Nobody is never not doing it" is equivalent to "nobody is at least sometimes doing it" is equivalent to "everybody never does it".

Two negations on different parts of the sentence also don't reinforce each other: "not everyone is not doing it" if equivalent to "some people are doing it".

To me treating double negative as reinforcement of the negation is a weird, unintuitive corner case that doesn't fit in the broader framework of the English language.

You're of course welcome to present your own analysis on how negation and double-negation fit into the broader framework of the English language.

But be aware that these kinds of arguments bear striking similarities to the arguments we have about the singular "they", which someone on a message board will always seem to have ironclad logical arguments against, only to find their argument foiled by incontrovertible evidence of its acceptability in Standard English.

Treating multiple negation as reinforcement may be weird and unintuitive to you, but earlier English speakers would disagree. In fact, it is the "binary toggle" negation that is the impostor in English, having been grafted from Latin by 18th century grammarians.

http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/aint-nothin-wrong-wit...

Double negatives as reinforcement fit just fine in several English dialects. Whether they do so in _your_ dialect is something you can judge. But any argument that depends on language features being "intuitive" or avoiding "corner cases" doesn't take into account how human language actually works. Double negatives would hardly be the most unintuitive feature of English.

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