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From: kanze@lts.sel.alcatel.de (James Kanze US/ESC 60/3/141 #40763)
Subject: Re: Comparison of languages for CS1 and CS2
In-Reply-To: Erik Naggum's message of 08 Aug 1995 17:50:53 GMT
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Date: 09 Aug 1995 09:43:22 GMT
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.edu:13811 comp.lang.ada:33688 comp.lang.c++:142942 sci.lang:41948

In article <19950808T175053Z@naggum.no> Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
writes:

|> [Richard Riehle]

|> |   "I do not have no money."  In any language but English, the more times
|> |   I include a negative in my sentence, the more I mean "No."

|> neither French, German, Danish, Norwegian, nor Swedish seem to fit your
|> idea of "any language but English".  in other words: hogwash.  it is only
|> in colloquial English that I have ever seen anything like double negations
|> meaning "more negative".  in all the languages I know, double negations are
|> either meaningless or just hard to parse positives.

Come now: in French, the standard is at least two negatives.  A
sentence like ``Personne n'en saura plus jamais rien'' is not at all
strange or sub-standard, although it contains five negatives.
(Literally: ``Nobody won't never know nothing no more.''  But I don't
think you'd say it this way in English:-).)  Italian has similar
constructs (``Nessuno non sapera piu mai niente.''  The French, word
for word.)

Its just an impression, but I get the feeling that the rule concerning
double negatives is a purely Germanic phenomena.  In which case,
(re-)introducing it into English would be a return to the source (and
a denial of the French influence which allowed it in the first place).

On the other hand, in the French example, all of the `negatives'
except ne (n') derive from positives in Latin, and with the exception
of `rien', can be positives in other contexts.

BTW: I have added sci.lang to the cross-postings, and set followups
there.  Interesting as it is, this has really wandered too far from
C++ to belong in comp.lang.c++ anymore.
-- 
James Kanze         Tel.: (+33) 88 14 49 00        email: kanze@gabi-soft.fr
GABI Software, Sarl., 8 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
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