Why the serial (Oxford) comma is important

[Críostóir]

But wouldn't there be a case in which you would write: "There is/I have no embarrassment, inhibition and awkwardness anymore", because you need to express that you used to have those feelings, but now they are gone, they don't exist anymore?

That's a different grammatical structure -- and I'm too tired to explain it. If you said, "I don't have my house, my garden ___ my dog any more", though, the proper conjunction would be "or".

Crio?

Or. Definitely 'or' there. I would not use 'and' in belamo's sentence.

This is easily the sexiest thread I have ever read on JUB.

I should have used different examples. How about "I like to kiss, suck dick, and fuck"?

 

[belamyi]

Or. Definitely 'or' there. I would not use 'and' in belamo's sentence.

Neither would I, but not for logical reasons, and that only in the case in which the logic, as I said, demands "and", beyond your habit of seeing certain words together, without thinking of why they are there thast way and not another. As I said commenting on your previuous post, the logic of language would allow a different choice, but the trend of common discourse simply picks up the other one. You are not giving any reason there making sense of that choice.
However, I still do not understand your example with the apples, grapes and pears.

 

[Kulindahr]

Or. Definitely 'or' there. I would not use 'and' in belamo's sentence.

I was hoping for an explanation of the different structures, why one legitimately uses "and" while the other doesn't.

 

[belamyi]

I was hoping for an explanation of the different structures, why one legitimately uses "and" while the other doesn't.

Now we are two. Some snack while we are waiting, or maybe we would be waiting for Godot?

 

[Críostóir]

It's not ordinary English to say *I do not have apples, grapes, and pears. If you want to deny having any of the fruits, you would say I do not have apples, grapes, or pears.

That's because negation ordinarily requires disjunction. That's just a rule of how English works. There's no more logic to it than the rule that you don't use negatives with minimizing adjectives: *I didn't hardly see him is not considered correct in the standard dialects.

I probably shouldn't have brought it up here, because it's confusing, but I was just saying I can imagine a context where you WOULD say *I do not have apples, grapes, and pears. IF you've been discussing what fruit you do have and/or formerly had all three BUT NOW HAVE SOME BUT NOT ALL, you might say that. But it would be being cute and it still wouldn't be standard English.

 

[DonQuixote]

belamo,

While it is true that Either/Or are coupled when implying choice is available, OR being in a sentence does not mandate choice.

From Boolean logic:
If a then b MAY require that
If Not a then Not b,
but it is a fallacy to imply
If b then a from the above.
So, too, with la lingua propria.

As Crio mentioned, earlier, a more archaic form of the negative was Neither/Nor.

The antecedent "n" in Nor has been lopped off in most modern English, but it being gone does not mean it is forgotten in the Rules of the language.

A suggestion, any time you have a sentence using Neither, or where a correct substitution would be Neither, silently append the "n" from Neither onto the subsequent or, and you will see that no choice is left to you. The lazy shortening of the Nor to Or does not negate the lack of choice in the sentence structure.

Ni uno, dos, o tres =
Ni uno, ni dos, y tambien no tres.

(I hope my Spanish is not so rusty as to have made an abomination of that example.)

As for Crio's example

If I say "I do not have apples, grapes, and pears"

Going back to the Mathematical Logic you love so well -
Boolean Logic

Not A, G and P =
Not [A, G, ans P] as far as Boolean Logic is concerned.

It is only true if one has NONE of the three.

Missing one or more of the set makes the whole statement false.

It is awkward in English words in a grammatically correct sentence, but clear if you set it up the way it would be in math.

The solution to some of the confusion is to recast some of the examples to make them less ambiguous for all. It does not negate their actual meaning, if argued in a literary "court of law", however.

I see Crio has posted just ahead of me!

 

[Críostóir]

DonQ, Boolean logic isn't what drives English grammar. And negation in Spanish is discontinuous, unlike in English, so Spanish examples aren't really germane (pun intended) either.

Compare the following examples:

I don't have apples or pears.
I don't have either apples or pears.
I have neither apples nor pears.​

All of these are correct English, and all deny having apples as well as denying having pears. The last two in particular are interesting, because they show the English tendency to have just one "piece" of negative; you either negate the verb ("don't have") or use 'neither...nor', but not both.

OTOH, It's interesting that 'neither...nor' is itself discontinuous! But under the "negate once" rule, it counts as one negation.

Simplifying all this: when all the items of a list are negated (or the semantics of the sentence are denying their existence), use 'or'. Period. You'll never be wrong if you do that.

 

[Kulindahr]

Just to muddy the waters, this is perfectly legit:

"I don't have peas, I don't have corn, and I don't have beans."

Now, if arithmetic rules applied,

"I don't have peas, corn, and beans" would also be legit.

edited to make my intent plain.

This is what I meant by different structures.

 

[belamyi]

It's not ordinary English to say *I do not have apples, grapes, and pears. If you want to deny having any of the fruits, you would say I do not have apples, grapes, or pears.

That's because negation ordinarily requires disjunction. That's just a rule of how English works. There's no more logic to it than the rule that you don't use negatives with minimizing adjectives: *I didn't hardly see him is not considered correct in the standard dialects.

I probably shouldn't have brought it up here, because it's confusing, but I was just saying I can imagine a context where you WOULD say *I do not have apples, grapes, and pears. IF you've been discussing what fruit you do have and/or formerly had all three BUT NOW HAVE SOME BUT NOT ALL, you might say that. But it would be being cute and it still wouldn't be standard English.

So it wouldn't be English. It either makes sense in the grammar or it doesn't, not matter how odd. I don't mean a logical possibility that could have become part of the grammar, but a choice that fits in the grammar and is simply skipped by common usage.
I'm sorry, aside from my usual belamian self, I don't see how that "cute" last example would make any sense in English. I don't see the logic. I try to translate it into another language to get that logical sense and still can't see it.

The problem and fun with languages is that it's not always that easy to abstract the logical sense from the grammatical sense you use to convey the former and, most importantly, don't mix and mistake syntax and sense: the rule you remembered to us about negation and disjunction doesn't work the same way with fruits and with subjective feelings, simply because the "grammar", the logic of sense and syntax involved in both class of items is not the same, at least not in English... and in a few more languages. I am not saying that you are wrong, or the rule is wrong or logically stupid, I am only saying that in that case (not meaning to single out English, just considering it as a mere grammatical rule) seems to ignore a nuance that it is not considered necessary to mark. That's all.

 

[belamyi]

DonQ, Boolean logic isn't what drives English grammar. And negation in Spanish is discontinuous, unlike in English, so Spanish examples aren't really germane (pun intended) either.

Spanish, Castillian is a very discontinuous language No, seriously. It's not an empty claim that it's considered to be the Romance language whose syntax and even phonetics remain closer to the original Latin from which those languages derive. That's why the wild latinization of Góngora doesn't seem as wild to Spaniards (to those who know him at all ) as that of Milton to English speakers, who nonetheless have always appreciated him more than the former "their" poet.

It's not exactly, as it is often proposed, that grammar shapes our thinking, but it still sets a frame of mind that can condition the way people think, because people don't usually think beyond that basical frame. On the other extreme, the looseness of Spaniards shows even in the way they think and "make their grammar speak" (mark my choice of words): syntax and intonation, that is, the strict rule of grammar, the logic of it, even in the formal speech of national public news broadcast, is sometimes totally at odds with the sense they are supposed or expected to convey... that's because there is a total discontinuity in Spaniards'
minds between the goals and the means, and that's why they can be so fucked up in their ruling and politics, while remaining extraordinarily inventive and poetics when they can think beyond established rules whenever it's more useful and makes more sense to go beyond them along new roads than to stick to old ways.
Maybe that's why the "fucked up" language of classical grecolatin literature, Chinese poetry or even Dante or (I don't mean "and" )Shakespeare would sometime make sense more easily to me than to some clever Anglos

 

[belamyi]

edited to make my intent plain.

This is what I meant by different structures.

Did you actually take all that so seriously or am I taking it too seriously now?

 

[DonQuixote]

Kuli takes many things VERY seriously.

 

[belamyi]

Now that I think of it, the only feature of Castillian that still leaves a certain scent of continuity in the language is the consecutio temporum that some Chinese students seem to find so puzzling.
Idle remark, I had to post it to complete idle #130.

 

[Críostóir]

It's not exactly, as it is often proposed, that grammar shapes our thinking, but it still sets a frame of mind that can condition the way people think, because people don't usually think beyond that basic frame.

This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after the people who came up with it first.

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an insurance adjuster (hey, linguists need day jobs, trust me), and he inspected a fire site where a bunch of freshly-tanned hides had caught fire. Sparks from the "blower" set them alight.

He noted that if you call it a blower, people set it up blowing IN, and the sparks from it go into the warehouse. If you call it an exhaust fan, they set it blowing out (same air movement, in an enclosed warehouse with one other opening) and the sparks go out. So the naming of the device determined whether the warehouse burned down!

(They're still called exhaust fans, even though better electric technology has eliminated most of the sparks.)

Sapir-Whorf is in better credit now than before, because we now know that people don't typically remember what actually happens; we remember the story we tell ourselves about what happens. Experiment after experiment bears this out.

This is why eye-witness testimony, though convincing to a jury, is virtually worthless when it comes to determining what actually happened; eye witnesses remember what they thought about what happened, and if they're asked a question that wasn't covered in their story, their brain fills it in with something it made up, and even though the witness thinks s/he's telling the truth, it's usually complete crap. And they're so SURE that the jury almost always believes them.

 

[belamyi]

This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after the people who came up with it first.

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an insurance adjuster (hey, linguists need day jobs, trust me), and he inspected a fire site where a bunch of freshly-tanned hides had caught fire. Sparks from the "blower" set them alight.

He noted that if you call it a blower, people set it up blowing IN, and the sparks from it go into the warehouse. If you call it an exhaust fan, they set it blowing out (same air movement, in an enclosed warehouse with one other opening) and the sparks go out. So the naming of the device determined whether the warehouse burned down!

(They're still called exhaust fans, even though better electric technology has eliminated most of the sparks.)

Sapir-Whorf is in better credit now than before, because we now know that people don't typically remember what actually happens; we remember the story we tell ourselves about what happens. Experiment after experiment bears this out.

This is why eye-witness testimony, though convincing to a jury, is virtually worthless when it comes to determining what actually happened; eye witnesses remember what they thought about what happened, and if they're asked a question that wasn't covered in their story, their brain fills it in with something it made up, and even though the witness thinks s/he's telling the truth, it's usually complete crap. And they're so SURE that the jury almost always believes them.

Not "this", "that" because the S-P hypo is what I mention, rejecting it, in the first part of my post
But it's true I should have elaborated that plain rejection to mark the distance with Sapir... maybe I'll wait a couple of days to write it down and post it, just like you did
In anticipation of it, I said "it CAN condition" not because it MUST, not because there IS "something" there to make it be so, because, like with thinking in general, people usually take what is given to them by tradition or the plain appearance of experience (say, the Earth being flat) as the end, instead of the beginning of a process: that is why it is easier and far more common to follow and believe in something like the Bible than to make science, or to believe in science as in a religion than to actually understand and practice it.

 

[Críostóir]

Not "this", "that" because the S-P hypo is what I mention, rejecting it, in the first part of my post
But it's true I should have elaborated that plain rejection to mark the distance with Sapir... maybe I'll wait a couple of days to write it down and post it, just like you did

I don't know what "not 'this', 'that'" means. I suspect it's a word-for-word translation of something that makes sense in Spanish.

I was aware that you were rejecting Sapir-Whorf. I'm disagreeing. I think the effect is stronger than Whorf thought, not weaker.

ETA: it's not grammar alone that shapes our thinking, to be sure. The way we divide up the world into words isn't precisely grammar, but it has a profound effect on how we see the world. For example, two butch men might disagree on whether something was "orange" or "pink," whereas a woman or an FIT student would simply call it "peach"! Seriously, in Russian some things are goluboi and others are cinii, and while English-speaking people would call both of them "blue," they're not regarded by Russians as any closer in color than what we call "blue" is from "green."

 

[belamyi]

I don't know what "not 'this', 'that'" means. I suspect it's a word-for-word translation of something that makes sense in Spanish.

It's a word-for-word translation of the same concepts that you can find in English, Spanish, Chinese or Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonstrative#Demonstrative_determiners_and_pronouns

I was aware that you were rejecting Sapir-Whorf. I'm disagreeing. I think the effect is stronger than Whorf thought, not weaker.

I was rejecting the extent of its reach: in fact some would think I follow Sapir, which is like saying that Michele Bachmann follows the Bible. But I guess any drop of water in a desert may seem a water well...

 

[Críostóir]

It's a word-for-word translation of the same concepts that you can find in English, Spanish, Chinese or Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonstrative#Demonstrative_determiners_and_pronouns

I'm going to ignore your snideness and just let you know that the distinction between 'this' and 'that' is not that strong in English. They're almost interchangeable, in fact.

 

[belamyi]

I'm going to ignore your snideness and just let you know that the distinction between 'this' and 'that' is not that strong in English. They're almost interchangeable, in fact.

Why do you think I posted that, and I am trying to poke fun at the wondrous flexibility and richness of that language that is the language of [STRIKE]Shakespeare[/STRIKE], [STRIKE]Dickens[/STRIKE], [STRIKE]James Joyce[/STRIKE], Mark Twain?
No matter how receding, that nuance still exists in English, so let's make use of it for as long as it still makes SOME sense

You know, sometimes, for some reason after what I have read from you here, when I read "Críostóir", it's like there would be written "Nabokov" in the username place.

 

[Críostóir]

You know, sometimes, for some reason after what I have read from you here, when I read "Críostóir", it's like there would be written "Nabokov" in the username place.

Now THAT is a compliment. Thank you.