Great video on The Linguistics of African American vernacular.

[brothir]

typedef unsigned int u32;

const u32 n = 10;
u32 a[] = {10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 ,1};

for (u32 i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    u32 min = i;
    for(u32 j = i; j < n; j++)
        if (a[j] < a[min]) min = j;
    u32 temp = a;
    a = a[min];
    a[min] = a;
}

That's sums up what I think, more or less.

 

[Rod1]

I only speak English and German. Would that I spoke more.

I have pidgin fluency in a few other languages, and can (like many people) read French without too much problem, but could never speak it.

German, to my mind, has a lot of advantages over English. The real benefits of English, as a language, are that it has such a stupefyingly gigantic amount of words in its lexicon, and yet at the same time it is a grammatically very simple language, so it's easy to learn. If the world had to get stuck with a lingua franca, English is a pretty good choice ... if its antiquated and haphazard spelling could get reformed, it would be even better.

I dont think that the reason why double negatives were dropped was because of complexity, its actually pretty easy to think of double negatives in literary terms.

I think the reason why they were dropped is because german doesnt have them and a stupid amount of germans emigrated to the US and became a pretty dominant group. But thats just a theory.

When i say "No sabes nada" "You dont know nothing" at no point would i think about it in a mathematical sense. Since you dont know, means lack of knowledge, and nothing seems to be more of an adjective to exaggerate the level of ignorance.

 

[dontsnitch]

Oh absolutely. If some guy came in speaking jive I'd have a negative reaction, just like I would expect my white ass to be discriminated against if I went in for an interview going full Joe Pesci on my interview.

I guess context matters a lot. If I'm on the street, I would never tell someone they're wrong even if they are, cause it's not relevant. I took the video to mean, perhaps incorrectly, in an absolute sense like in a classroom, or educational setting.

 

[brothir]

Also, there not being a specific mode for C code is disgraceful.

 

[IDL]

Is that property additive or multiplicative? or does it depends on wether a calculation sign is present?

If i say -10 -10 does it means 100, does it means -20, does it means 0? it will depend on the literary convention at hand. Just like math.

We are not binary machines.

Are you disagreeing with the concept of a double negative equaling a positive?

Logic and reason is linear and has mathematical qualities.

 

[Rex Kwon Do]

I only speak English and German. Would that I spoke more.

I have pidgin fluency in a few other languages, and can (like many people) read French without too much problem, but could never speak it.

German, to my mind, has a lot of advantages over English. The real benefits of English, as a language, are that it has such a stupefyingly gigantic amount of words in its lexicon, and yet at the same time it is a grammatically very simple language, so it's easy to learn. If the world had to get stuck with a lingua franca, English is a pretty good choice ... if its antiquated and haphazard spelling could get reformed, it would be even better.

Which is a can of worms, because English phonology varies so much. If we developed a phonetic orthography, first of all there'd be an unwieldy number of vowel glyphs and secondly it'd only represent one specific accent. Written down, the English I speak would look quite different from the English the Queen speaks. The great strength of our common pseudo-phonetic orthography is it allows for easy comprehension by speakers of all different dialects (or at least accent groups) within English.

 

[Rod1]

wait, so people are aguing that slang, particularly the improper use of grammer, syntax, tense, and person just becomes the norm, in effect negating all the long held rules of formal writing?

That be absurd

Long held?

 

[Rod1]

Are you disagreeing with the concept of a double negative equaling a positive?

Logic and reason is linear and has mathematical qualities.

The abstract concept? no, merely the idea that language is a mathematical concept.

As i said before what does -10 -10 means in absolute terms?

 

[HunterSdVa29]

Long held?

essentially since we transitioned from Middle English, yes. sure, the way you cite certain things changes frequently, but the normal rules of syntax and grammar have been around....

Don't recall reading any Enlightenment texts w/ 'be' in lieu of 'is' or 'are', just saying. Coming up w/ subs b/c you literally are ignorant of the actual rules of a language doesn't mean we should just accept that. No need to 'settle' on that issue

And i literally speak in ebonics/slang in virtually all my private convos, just not at work, so it's not like i'm against talking like that, but cmon

 

[IDL]

The abstract concept? no, merely the idea that language is a mathematical concept.

As i said before what does -10 -10 means in absolute terms?

I am not saying language equals math (OMG, another math like quality in the context of comparisons)

I'm saying it has mathematical qualities within it.

A negative applied to a negative in the context of language (modifiers) would be most equivalent to multiplication IMO. Seems a pointless debate though, because we both know what it means.

 

[Zankou]

I dont think that the reason why double negatives were dropped was because of complexity, its actually pretty easy to think of double negatives in literary terms.

I think the reason why they were dropped is because german doesnt have them and a stupid amount of germans emigrated to the US and became a pretty dominant group. But thats just a theory.

When i say "No sabes nada" "You dont know nothing" at no point would i think about it in a mathematical sense. Since you dont know, means lack of knowledge, and nothing seems to be more of an adjective to exaggerate the level of ignorance.

I tried to look it up, but it's not that easy to find the answer. Wiki gives the classic explanation, that it was 17th/18th century English prescriptivism, with the rise of mass education, following Latin logical structures (it cannot have been from ethnic German influence, btw, because its loss is common to English-English as well).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative#English

However I've seen other sources indicating that this isn't really historically correct, and the double negative was already being excluded from English for internal functional reasons, i.e. it doesn't really play nicely with Germanic grammar, which is why none of the other West Germanic languages allow it. So it was a sort of temporary innovation in English that didn't ever take very well.

In other languages, it might work fine, because you have other ways of making the point clear potentially, but in English I really think the use of double negation tends to impede long logical sentences. To be clear, you end up needing other devices to signal that it's 'emphatic double negation' and not 'negating double negation,' and this just makes a mess of things.

 

[nixkid]

No, dude, you're wrong. Prescriptivism has no place in the English language. We have no language-regulating academy like Spanish or French. That's part of why English is so dynamic.

AAVE is actually quite complex and not a lesser form of English. It just developed on a different track from the other mainstream forms of American English. It's like saying Scottish English is improper English. If an entire speech community uses language the same way--black Americans in this case--it's not wrong, it's just different. It's essentially a dialect at that point.

Holy shit. I think I may have had you pegged wrong.

 

[Zankou]

Which is a can of worms, because English phonology varies so much. If we developed a phonetic orthography, first of all there'd be an unwieldy number of vowel glyphs and secondly it'd only represent one specific accent. Written down, the English I speak would look quite different from the English the Queen speaks. The great strength of our common pseudo-phonetic orthography is it allows for easy comprehension by speakers of all different dialects (or at least accent groups) within English.

You are right that you could never match exactly, but consider that phonology and phonetics are two different things. In English, we commonly don't even spell sounds that have the same *phonological* value the same way, setting aside the phonetic realization. We use random false-phonetic values for the same phonology. This doesn't make much sense.

You could do a phonological reform of English spelling to make it much more consistent, and secondly a phonetic reform to make it more consistent as well, even though the end result will always be pseudo-phonetic, as you say, relative to any given dialect (and will eventually become more and more out of date).

The French recently created an uproar by deleting superfluous orthography, killing the pointless circumflex. Unless you want your formal literate orthography to become more and more inane over time, over-complicated for no logical reason, you've got to occasionally modernize in such ways:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35496893

 

[nixkid]

Sure, that makes sense. It's still wrong in the interim. Unless we want to say that it's proper English to say "I be in the WR too much".

There is no such thing as proper English. There are many English dialects and Standard American English is just one. "I be in the WR too much" doesn't conform to Standard American English but that doesn't make it improper.

 

[Rod1]

I am not saying language equals math (OMG, another math like quality in the context of comparisons)

I'm saying it has mathematical qualities within it.

A negative applied to a negative in the context of language (modifiers) would be most equivalent to multiplication IMO. Seems a pointless debate though, because we both know what it means.

Thats because you grew up in a place where the convention was that. Just like base 10 makes sense in a world with only 10 digits.

To a lot of languages double negatives are additives, they are there to reinforce the negative quality of the expression.

 

[bufetadanacara]

I'll stick with the General American English, and I sure as hell hope that schools continue to teach this and only this version of English as well.

 

[Rex Kwon Do]

Holy shit. I think I may have had you pegged wrong.

I'm against big government, including big government linguistics.

 

[IDL]

Thats because you grew up in a place where the convention was that. Just like base 10 makes sense in a world with only 10 digits.

To a lot of languages double negatives are additives, they are there to reinforce the negative quality of the expression.

I feel like we're getting into the 'math and logic is a social construct and isn't real' territory.

Regardless of what form it takes, it is real world applicable.

 

[panamaican]

Basically ebonics is not knowing how to properly conjugate verbs.



Such as? There are rules to grammar you are either following them or not. There exceptions but they are known. Not sure this makes it not logical. But of course an exception excludes consistency.

Interestingly, you can see the grammar inconsistencies when small children learn to speak American English. They take grammar rules and apply them consistently, resulting in things like "I falled down," because they can't realize that -ed isn't universally applicable when discussing past events.

There are plenty of others but that one stands out because it's one of the few areas where kids sometimes go backwards. When they first start talking they say "fell" because they're repeating adults but once they think they know the rules of grammar, they say "falled". And that continues until they are taught to separate the grammar inconsistencies that are unacceptable from the ones we condone.

 

[Rod1]

I feel like we're getting into the 'math and logic is a social construct and isn't real' territory.

Regardless of what form it takes, it is real world applicable.

So you are claiming that base 10 is absolute and there couldnt be any system besides base 10 beccause we absolutely cant have more than 10 digits?

Because thats retarded, abstract things are abstract because they dont exist in the real world, logic exists indeed, but the way we translate an abstract idea into a language we can understand is indeed a social construct.

The way the mayans and the greeks did math was completely different even if they came to the same conclusions and worked with the same concepts.