tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 30 17:09:06 2009

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Re: Double negatives

Christopher Doty ([email protected])



My dialect (Oregon Coast) is pretty standard, but there's a lot of
variation.  There are definitely people form my home town who say
"ain't" and the like, as do some members of my extended family, but
neither of my parents do, and I never did growing up.

That said, my dialect does have a few odd things: lots of nasalization
(even more than most Englishes!), a super-rhotic /r/, and a verb "to
haff" (back-formation from "have to" /haf to/; e.g., I say "I got the
money without haffing to go to the bank).

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 16:47, Mark J. Reed <[email protected]> wrote:
> You're not weird.  Many people wind up adopting the spoken equivalent
> of formal written English as their everyday language.  I suppose
> somewhere there are entire communities who do that, and children born
> into such communities do have it as their L1.  But that's not the
> norm.  Even though my parents both try to hew to the conventions of
> the literary standard in their speech, my peers didn't, so it still
> wasn't really my L1.
>
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Seruq <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Maybe I'm weird, but I don't use double negatives, and if someone says a double negative to me I ask
>> them to clarify their actual intent.
>>
>>
>> DloraH
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <[email protected]>
>
>
>
>






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