On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 10:30:58AM +0100, aitor wrote:
> On 24/12/20 10:23, aitor wrote:
> > neither the mouse nor the keyboard didn't respond
> Mmm..., this is a double denial. Neither the mouse nor the keyboard could
> respond?

Agreed. Happy to see neither..nor used. Sometimes that's the clearest way to
say something.

But I'd have said "neither the mouse nor the keyboard responded".

This seems to be the prevailing English convention about double negation
nowadays -- that a double negation is a positive.

Historical note:

But there's an older convention (which I've heard dates back to Old English
and is common in other modern languages) where a double negation is used for
emphasis.

As in,

I ain't seen nothing!

This convention, which is perfectly understandable, was stamped out of
educated usage bu grammarians who slammed their understanding of Latin grammar
onto English which until than had a quite different grammer.

Another such an example is
John and me went swimming.
Here 'and' serves as a preposition. Again, not Latin grammar.
And this has led fo confusion, when students misunderstand the new
Latin-inspired rules and start to treat 'and' as a preposition taking -- of
all things -- the nominative and end up with
He gave the ball to John and I.

Long live the complexities of evolving languages!

-- hendrik
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng