On 24/12/2020 14:49, Hendrik Boom wrote:
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".
I would have just said 'the mouse nor the keyboard responded' or
'neither the mouse or the keyboard responded', no need for 'neither and
'nor'.
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!
Well it might be if "ain't" was a proper word, in fact, the whole
sentence is gibberish, I personally would say 'I didn't see anything'.
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.
The problem is that there are millions of People who speak English
(which is not to be confused with what they speak in the USA), but there
only a relative few that try to make the rules and they keep trying to
change them.
Long live the complexities of evolving languages!
Which only makes sense if they evolve in a sensible way 😂
Rowland
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