[mattyb]

What is the difference between :

You can't never know enough

and

You can never not know enough

P.S. I haven't even been drinking or smoking anything, but since reading angelmb's post I can't stop thinking about these two sentences.

[turtle777]

Paging Oisin.

-t

[Spheric Harlot]

Just parse the words in the order they're written:

You can not (never know enough)
The first means that you will eventually achieve sufficient knowledge.

You can never (not know enough)
The latter means that you always HAVE sufficient knowledge.


Awkward phrasing on the first one, but not that difficult to work out.

[mattyb]

Strange, I didn't get the same impression from either of the sentences.

To me, the goal of 'knowing enough', in both cases, is never achieved.

[mattyb]

Try the opposite :

You can know enough
You can never know enough
You can not know enough

...

I'm confusing myself now. Time for bed.

[colourfastt]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

What is the difference between :

You can't never know enough

and

You can never not know enough

P.S. I haven't even been drinking or smoking anything, but since reading angelmb's post I can't stop thinking about these two sentences.

If one were to try a sentence similar to the first, then to be grammatically correct it would have to be: You can't ever know enough.

[Spheric Harlot]

No, that would mean the exact opposite.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

Strange, I didn't get the same impression from either of the sentences.

To me, the goal of 'knowing enough', in both cases, is never achieved.

That is definitely not what the second sentence is saying.

It's absolutely clear that "not knowing enough" is a state that can never be achieved.

You can never not know enough.

No ambiguity whatsoever.

[Chuckit]

The second sentence means you always have to know enough (through double negation, "can never not know" becomes "must always know").

The first sentence has two interpretations. The strict, traditional prescriptivist interpretation would have it mean "It is impossible to go through life without ever knowing enough" (the double negation here is "can't never know," which is expressed positively as "must at some time know"). However, in actual use, it's identical to "can never know enough."

[0157988944]

You can't never know enough:

Never knowing enough is not possible.

You can never not know enough:

Not knowing enough is never possible.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

The first sentence has two interpretations. The strict, traditional prescriptivist interpretation would have it mean "It is impossible to go through life without ever knowing enough" (the double negation here is "can't never know," which is expressed positively as "must at some time know"). However, in actual use, it's identical to "can never know enough."

I wouldn't call that two "interpretations".

What you're saying is that in colloquial usage, "You can't never know enough" means exactly the same thing as "You can never know enough", even though it explicitly states the exact opposite.

That may be the case, but it's just flat-out wrong, and indicative of people who simply are unwilling or unable to understand what they are saying, and why.

It's much the same as "I could care less", which actually means the opposite of what people intend it to.

My daughter will repeat phrases and sentences she's heard with similar errors, but she's two-and-a-half.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

I wouldn't call that two "interpretations".

What you're saying is that in colloquial usage, "You can't never know enough" means exactly the same thing as "You can never know enough", even though it explicitly states the exact opposite.

No, that's not exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that it depends upon the dialect of English that you are using.

In the prestige dialect of "proper" English, it means the first thing that I said because double negatives are taken as canceling each other out.

In other dialects, however, a double negative is an intensifier — and actually, those dialects are more historically correct than "proper" English. For example, Chaucer's works are full of double negatives. The rule against double negatives is relatively recent, and was invented arbitrarily by grammarians who decided double negatives were illogical.

[colourfastt]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

I wouldn't call that two "interpretations".

What you're saying is that in colloquial usage, "You can't never know enough" means exactly the same thing as "You can never know enough", even though it explicitly states the exact opposite.

That may be the case, but it's just flat-out wrong, and indicative of people who simply are unwilling or unable to understand what they are saying, and why.

It's much the same as "I could care less", which actually means the opposite of what people intend it to.

My daughter will repeat phrases and sentences she's heard with similar errors, but she's two-and-a-half.

The most common phrase errors: "gone missing" and "went missing".

[Big Mac]

As has been pointed out, the first example is a Double Negative, a grammatical construction once accepted and common in English but which is inappropriate in modern usage.

How are double negatives treated in French or German?

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

You can't never know enough

and

You can never not know enough.

The first one is disallowing something, the second is allowing it.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

No, that's not exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that it depends upon the dialect of English that you are using.

In the prestige dialect of "proper" English, it means the first thing that I said because double negatives are taken as canceling each other out.

Is it really a double negative though?

"never" is not a negation. It's merely a quantifier. It could equally be "eventually", "sometimes", or "always", grammatically.

Edit: from Big Mac's wiki link, I see that it is in fact a negation. The link also explains that double negations don't occur in the Germanjc languages except afrikaans, although I'm aware of a German regional variant most often used humorously, "nie nicht" (never not), which is just a stronger form of "never".

[Oisín]

^ As your edit says, ‘never’ is a full-on negation, being a contraction of ‘not ever’ (well, ne ǣfre, to be exact).

Germanic languages have never had double negations as the standard (as Spanish, for example, does), but nearly all modern Germanic negations come from compound negations, as in French—even ‘not’ comes from nā wiht (‘no thing’), and even nā (‘no’) comes from ne + ā (‘not ever’). ‘Never’ is actually a good example of this, since it can still be split up into ‘[negation] + ever’. The sentences, “Can’t you ever do anything right?” and “Can you never do anything right?”, while differing slightly in degree of annoyance, are essentially the same and mean the same thing.

So the concept of compound negatives is not at all a foreign one to Germanic languages, though English is the only one (I think) that still maintains such a productive and vibrant form of compound negations, having special forms of indefinite pronouns and certain nouns to be used as part of compound negations (aka, ‘some’ vs. ‘any’, etc.). Despite Chaucer et al., actual double negations are not indigenous to Germanic languages and are borrowings from Romance languages, where they’re often mandatory.

[ghporter]

I think that we native English speakers have been so accustomed (trained by the grammar school teachers' rulers!) to avoid double negation that the clumsy construction in the first example simply boggles us. Parsing carefully DOES come up with the two meanings Spheric Harlot suggested, but it's quite clumsy for both.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

I think that we native English speakers have been so accustomed (trained by the grammar school teachers' rulers!) to avoid double negation that the clumsy construction in the first example simply boggles us. Parsing carefully DOES come up with the two meanings Spheric Harlot suggested, but it's quite clumsy for both.

Surely, you mean the second example, right?

In many dialects of English, the first example is quite common language usage: “You can’t never know enough” is no different from, say, “I ain’t never seen nobody do that before”, which no native speaker should have any trouble parsing.

The second example, however, is distinctly odd, both in actual construction (it kind of grates just to hear it), but also in content: it will never be possible not to know enough? So it will always be the case that you know enough? Sort of like a self-esteem coach on heroin? “Don’t worry about it—whatever happens, you’ll always know everything you need to (whether you actually know anything or not)”? Seems very odd to me.

And I just noticed that this was a reference to angelmb’s post. As it says on the Wikipedia page Big Mac linked to, double negatives are quite common in South American English, where they’ve been ‘transplanted’ from Spanish (where they’re mandatory). Don’t forget that angelmb has Spanish, not English, as his native language. In Spanish, you’d say, for instance, “No se sabe jamás bastante” (personally, I’d find the alternative “Jamás se sabe bastante” more euphonic; but that would bring the negation to a pre-verb position, in which case no double negative is required [or possible] in Spanish, and it wouldn’t have been transplanted to the English sentence, either).

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

Surely, you mean the second example, right?

No, it's the first example — "can't never" — that lends itself to two interpretations. There's the common, colloquial reading (where double negation is an intensifier), and the stricter reading (where double negation cancels itself out). The second one is awkward, but I'm pretty sure most English speakers would get the same meaning from it once they worked it out.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

No, it's the first example — "can't never" — that lends itself to two interpretations. There's the common, colloquial reading (where double negation is an intensifier), and the stricter reading (where double negation cancels itself out). The second one is awkward, but I'm pretty sure most English speakers would get the same meaning from it once they worked it out.

For ambiguity, yes—but I was questioning Glenn’s comment that “the clumsy construction in the first example simply boggles [native English speakers]”. That seemed rather odd to me, since it’s such a common, colloquial construction (albeit ambiguous).

The second example, on the other hand, is boggling to me—it’s the kind of sentence that you have to stop and think about before it parses properly in your head; the initial reaction is just confusion.

[andi*pandi]

double negatives are not never bad, m'kay?

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

double negatives are not never bad, m'kay?

This sentence have three error.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

This sentence have three error.

This sentence have one?

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

This sentence have one?

That is incorrectly correct.

[turtle777]

Is this the linguist's equivalent of dirty, cheap pron ?

-t

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Is this the linguist's equivalent of dirty, cheap pron ?

-t

Dirty, cheap midget pr0n, yes.

[mattyb]

I'm even more confused than when I created this thread.

The first beer has been opened.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

I'm even more confused than when I created this thread.

The first beer has been opened.

That sounds like a haiku.

[mattyb]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

That sounds like a haiku.

Heineken actually.

[andi*pandi]

post strange grammar thread
read strange responses thereto
open heineken

[Laminar]

Ha!

[mattyb]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

post strange grammar thread
read strange responses thereto
open heineken

[Sealobo]

it ain't gonna make no sense if it involves double-negative.

[voodoo]

You can't never know enough --> You can't ever know enough.

Since this was written by a native Spanish speaker, that would be my interpretation. Never ever, nunca jamás.

Mejor que nunca, better than ever. You see.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Sealobo 

it ain't gonna make no sense never if it doesn't involve no double-negative.

Fixinated.

-t