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JJ-JUNIOR
Triglot
Newbie
Brazil
nideck.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5416 days ago
13 posts - 14 votes
Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Spanish
Studies: French, German
| Message 49 of 54 29 November 2012 at 4:14pm | IP Logged |
schoenewaelder wrote:
Pedants always try and insist on "John and I" as being correct
for the subject, and the forbidding of double negatives, Which are Germanic traits,
whereas French happily uses "John and me" and double negatives.
It surprises me because the French parts of the language are usually considered the
more sophisticated or elitist, but here most normal ordinary folk seem to instinctively
adopt the French usage. |
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True, the more latin-like you speak English the more sophisticated or formal you sound.
A good example of this would be:
Freedom - Germanic nature coming from Freiheit
Liberty - French nature coming from Liberté
Exactly the same idea, different origins.
Edited by JJ-JUNIOR on 29 November 2012 at 4:15pm
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| vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish
| Message 50 of 54 29 November 2012 at 4:38pm | IP Logged |
JJ-JUNIOR wrote:
Freedom - Germanic nature coming from Freiheit
Liberty - French nature coming from Liberté |
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A nitpick: "freedom" doesn't come from "Freiheit", since English isn't a descendant of modern Standard German, nor did it borrow the word from it. Both the English "free" and the German "frei" descend from the Proto-Germanic "*frijaz", and "freedom" also descends directly from the P-G "*frijadōmaz". Middle High German derived "vrītuom" from the same source, but at some point in the formation of modern standard German the nominalizing suffix changed from "-tum" (English cognate: "-dom") to "-heit" (English cognate: "-hood").
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| limey75
Senior Member
United Kingdom
germanic.eu/
Joined 4188 days ago
119 posts - 182 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Norwegian, Old English
| Message 51 of 54 30 November 2012 at 4:43am | IP Logged |
schoenewaelder wrote:
Pedants always try and insist on "John and I" as being correct for the subject, and the forbidding of double negatives, Which are Germanic traits, whereas French happily uses "John and me" and double negatives.
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Old English happily used double negatives, as did even Chaucerian English, if I remember correctly.
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| Gosiak
Triglot
Senior Member
Poland
Joined 4915 days ago
241 posts - 361 votes
Speaks: Polish*, English, German
Studies: Norwegian, Welsh
| Message 52 of 54 30 November 2012 at 6:22am | IP Logged |
Scratch wrote:
Using double negatives in formal writing will continue to be frowned upon, I'm sure, because formal writing is nearly by definition pedantic.
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If by 'double negatives' you meant the negative concord, it's actually very often used in political speeches for very formal occasions because it tends to make the message behind the declarations somehow fuzzy and open to interpretations. "It's not uncommon that" does not mean that it is common, the meaning is somewhere in the broad spectrum between common and uncommon. Extensive use of the negative concord in complicated sentences often leads to the creation of a longish declaration that is not conveying anything directly.
Sorry for my off topic remark.
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| vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
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Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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| Message 53 of 54 30 November 2012 at 8:11am | IP Logged |
Gosiak wrote:
Scratch wrote:
Using double negatives in formal writing will continue to be frowned upon, I'm sure, because formal writing is nearly by definition pedantic.
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If by 'double negatives' you meant the negative concord, it's actually very often used in political speeches for very formal occasions because it tends to make the message behind the declarations somehow fuzzy and open to interpretations. "It's not uncommon that" does not mean that it is common, the meaning is somewhere in the broad spectrum between common and uncommon. Extensive use of the negative concord in complicated sentences often leads to the creation of a longish declaration that is not conveying anything directly. |
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This isn't an example of negative concord. Negative concord means that the two or more negatives reinforce each other, rather than cancel each other out or make the sentence more vague, like what you described. For example, the phrase you gave can be translated into French as "Il n'est pas inhabituel." The "n'" and "pas" are both negative, but they don't make the negation vague, since that's just the standard French way of negation ("Il n'est pas rouge" would normally be translated as "It's not red" rather than "It isn't not red" or something to that effect). The adjective "inhabituel" may be an antonym of the adjective "habituel" formed by the addition of the negative prefix "in-", but the adjective itself is not a grammatical marker of negation (and if you replace both "uncommon" in the English sentence and "inhabituel" in the French one with their synonym "rare" it won't even feel like a double/triple negative any more), so it doesn't reinforce the other negatives in the sentence. Thus the whole sentence means pretty much the same thing as your English example. True English examples of negative concord are sentences like "we don't need no education" or "I ain't never dropped no eaves", and this is definitely not standard English.
Edited by vonPeterhof on 30 November 2012 at 8:17am
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| Gosiak
Triglot
Senior Member
Poland
Joined 4915 days ago
241 posts - 361 votes
Speaks: Polish*, English, German
Studies: Norwegian, Welsh
| Message 54 of 54 30 November 2012 at 8:22am | IP Logged |
VonPeterhof, you're right, I stay corrected.
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