Hi Hendrik,
On 24/12/20 15:49, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> 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!
Thanks for your clarification :)
Aitor.
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Re: [DNG] Historical note on double…
