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Negative Question

fra sublimestyle,2011 1 31

Meldinger: 76

Språk: English

ceigered (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 1 14:54:30

I reckon (personally) that the test will be skewed by nature because people might overthink before getting to the "DON'T OVERTHINK IT!" part... But (unless someone's beaten it to me) I'll chuck it up on the Vidpunkto section. I don't imagine EOists generally bother though in leaving such vague answers with no extra context, or even asking such hard to answer questions in the first place. It seems like a very familiar thing to have someone reply a bare yes or no to one of those "haven't you/doesn't it/etc" questions, and even if they have no systematic use of using yes or no in reply to such a question, if they have the context we don't even care about the yes/no part, only the context of course.

EDIT: The link to the EO version poll

T0dd (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 1 15:31:20

This is a good example of the difference between logic and pragmatics. Logically, the question "Ĉu vi ne venos al la kunsido?" is equivalent to "Ĉu estas fakto, ke vi ne venos al la kunsido?" So if I'm planning on coming, the only logically possible answer should be "Ne". That is, No, it's not a fact that I'm not coming to the meeting.

As an anglophone (or yankophone, if you prefer) I hear the questions "Are you coming to the meeting" and "Aren't you coming to the meeting" as one and the same question, with only a difference in attitude expressed. In the second case, the questioner is conveying some degree of doubt that I'm coming to the meeting.

I ignore the fact that logically, as written or spoken, these are two different questions. I ignore the logic, just as a native Spanish speaker ignores the logic of double negatives and just uses them.

When native Spanish speakers learn Esperanto, they are expected to train themselves to stop using double negatives. They are expected to yield to the logic of the expressions, according to which a second negative cancels the first. I suppose, then, that it would make sense to promote the more logical way of responding to negative questions, i.e., "Ne, mi ja venos."

sudanglo (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 1 21:46:13

The following two questions are not the same:

1. Ĉu vi ne venos al la kunsido?
2. Ĉu estas fakto, ke vi ne venos al la kunsido?

How do I know this? Simple.

If I am not going to the meeting, to question 1. I reply Ne; to question two I reply Jes.

Question two is a positive question - ĉu estas fakto. Question one on the other hand is a negative question.

If you want an argument that goes beyond usage. Ne is short for Ne venos. Jes is short for jes venos.

sudanglo (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 1 22:11:31

Just occurred to me that that's how you translate the French 'si'.

Tu ne vais pas faire ça. Si!

Vi ne intencas fari tion. Mi jes faros!

(Mi ja faros is the emphatic form - mi jes faros is the contradiction.)

T0dd (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 2 03:35:27

sudanglo:The following two questions are not the same:

1. Ĉu vi ne venos al la kunsido?
2. Ĉu estas fakto, ke vi ne venos al la kunsido?

How do I know this? Simple.

If I am not going to the meeting, to question 1. I reply Ne; to question two I reply Jes.
Yes, that's how an anglophone would reply, but it's not logical.

For any proposition P, there is no difference in truth conditions between P and ESTAS FAKTO KE P.

In English, the truth conditions of "It's snowing" and "It's a fact that it's snowing" are exactly the same. There's never a case where one is true and the other is false. The same goes for VI NE VENOS and ESTAS FAKTO KE VI NE VENOS. Adding ĈU to the beginning doesn't alter this. They are logically equivalent.

You and I both would answer the first question with "Ne," assuming that we're not coming to the meeting. This only shows that we are so used to the illogicality of this way of answering that it's invisible to us, just as the illogicality of NO TENGO NADA is invisible to the native Spanish speaker.

ceigered (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 2 06:16:06

In this case logic might be thrown out the window, looking at the poll. INterestingly, a Japanese poster on the forum (you can check it out manually if you wish, on the first page), mentioned that questions about intention get the same yes/no answer as English. E.g. (just pretend these English sentences are Japanese)

Aren't you going to the party?
Yes I am going

Whereas he mentioned that things like:
Didn't you go to the party?
Yes I didn't.

I thought that was a good system, as it basically reads the intention. Link that to Sudanglo's idea about "ĉu estas fakto" and I think a pattern is arising.

It seems that reading the logic of the obvious written/spoken form of the question doesn't suffice, and that reading intention by using human intuition and ability to predict what sort of answer the questioner is expecting, are quite important, but can be largely systemised...

What I don't get is both this topic and the EO one, people keep on mentioning those bloody double negatives rido.gif (no offence of course but it's honestly going over my head how that's related haha, someone must be keeping me in the dark!)

And forgive me if that doesn't all make sense, I'm sort of feeling light headed (need sugar probably) thus I decided to make words up rather than check to see if they already exist.

sudanglo (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 2 12:02:03

Ah, But Todd, you didn't quote me in full.

You missed out the central point, namely that 'ĉu estas fakto ke' is a positive qestion not a negative one - in the same way that 'ĉu pluvas?' is a positive question.

And there is no disagreement about how to reply with short answers to the question 'ĉu pluvas?'

Logical truth of propositions isn't the issue here. It's a question about the language.

T0dd (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 2 13:50:03

sudanglo:Ah, But Todd, you didn't quote me in full.

You missed out the central point, namely that 'ĉu estas fakto ke' is a positive qestion not a negative one - in the same way that 'ĉu pluvas?' is a positive question.
ĈU ESTAS FAKTO KE and just ĈU are equivalent. Either one appended to the beginning of a declarative sentence generates logically equivalent sentences.

ĈU + VI NE VENOS
ĈU ESTOS FAKTO KE + VI NE VENOS

There's no difference. Both are negative. ĈU ESTAS FAKTO KE is just a four-word way of saying ĈU, just as PRO TIO KE is a three-word way of saying ĈAR.
And there is no disagreement about how to reply with short answers to the question 'ĉu pluvas?'

Logical truth of propositions isn't the issue here. It's a question about the language.
Indeed, there is a distinction between logic and pragmatics. Simple logical reading of the actual words indicates that if someone asks ĈU VI NE VENOS, and you want to reply that you won't be coming, you should answer JES. The fact that anglophones and others typically don't answer in this way simply shows that under certain conditions we don't heed the logic of what is said or written.

@ceigered -- That's why the double negative is relevant. It's the same phenomenon. Spanish NO TENGO NADA, or "I don't have nothing" is logically equivalent to "I have something," but the practice of Spanish speakers is to ignore this.

Another example in English is when people say "I could care less" when what they mean is precisely that they couldn't care less.

I imagine every language has its cases where logic and normal usage diverge. There's usually no misunderstanding because, as erinja pointed out, the whole speech community buys into the divergence. A language such as Esperanto, that's meant to function with people from various backgrounds, makes things potentially more confusing.

In this instance, the more common, but not universal, usage happens to be the illogical one, for historical reasons. I guess the question is whether that usage should be promoted because it's dominant, or challenged because it's illogical and therefore arbitrary.

ceigered (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 2 14:30:49

I guess the problem here is that the idea that it's illogical only applies to the spoken/written phrase itself - and that the so called illogical application of yes/no is applying instead to the thoughts of the speaker, almost as if the listener is trying to read the mind of the other person.

Or is that what pragmatics is? lango.gif Anyway, this seems to be on a completely different level to the language itself, with almost 2 different types of yes/no. A "confirmation/denial" set and a "positive/negative intention (in relation to topic action)". The problem being that jes/ne or yes/no or hai/iie etc are used for both, which doesn't quite work out as far as logic is applied on the codified language level.

I'm an amateur in the etymological sense though (at pretty much everything above final year of high school), thus my knowledge of this is patchy/irregularly applied/makeshiftly made from scratch as I go along, so forgive me if I'm wrong okulumo.gif

T0dd (Å vise profilen) 2011 2 2 14:43:30

ceigered:I guess the problem here is that the idea that it's illogical only applies to the spoken/written phrase itself - and that the so called illogical application of yes/no is applying instead to the thoughts of the speaker, almost as if the listener is trying to read the mind of the other person.

Or is that what pragmatics is?
Yes, pretty much. There's a gap between "sentence meaning" and "speaker meaning".

Yes We Have No Bananas

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