tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 30 14:51:48 2009
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Re: Double negatives
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Mark J. Reed <[email protected]> wrote:
> They are only grammatically incorrect in one variety of English that
> has no native speakers...
I tried to defuse this tangential argument by explicitly *not* calling
them grammatically incorrect.
> It's misleading to refer to any utterance emitted by a native
> speaker in normal conversation as grammatically incorrect.
Whether it's misleading or not, it's still how our reference material
on the Klingon language labels them. Please look at the section in TKW
which talks about them. "In normal conversation" isn't quite the right
context. "As a rhetorical device" is.
> Say rather that it is nonstandard.
I tried that, but "standard" wasn't taken as I intended. This time I
used the term "proper", which I expected to be understood as making
the appropriate distinction (but with the opposite sense, of course).
-- ghunchu'wI'