Double negatives in English | Canguro English

this is my favorite part of the day because this is when I come to the nursery to pick up my son Luca and it's very funny because when when I when I press the buzzer all of the children run to the glass looking for their mummy or daddy like um like this some type of prisoners it's really funny come say hi to Daddy hi Daddy you see what I made very funny hello and welcome to kangaroo English I'm Christian and today we are going to be talking about the double negative probably you have heard that the double negative in English is incorrect that it's similar to mathematics that if we have a negative plus another negative then it equals a positive but if we change one little thing then now the two negatives make a stronger negative and that is what we are going to talk about today because the double negative is not always incorrect it's a typical story from the history of English really that Old English and Middle English used to have double negatives Shakespeare used double negatives but then we had the intellectuals the grammarians who decided that they wanted English to be more similar to Latin and Latin doesn't have double negatives so they said right from now on English will not have double negatives double negatives are only for uneducated people and that's why we have the problem that we have today so what is a negative a negative in languages is when we say that something is not something and how do we make negatives in English there are three ways the first way is we can add a negation words like no or not for example he is not happy the second way is that we can add a prefix to the beginning of a word like um happy unhappy or we can add a suffix to the end of a word less for example hope and hopeless and the third way is that some words in English like hardly are automatically negative they contain a negative meaning inside them so the first reason that you might want to use a double negative is to express doubt to say that you're not sure about something for example here we have it is not impossible negative negative okay you could say it is possible but when we say it is not impossible we are expressing some doubt I don't think it's impossible but I'm not sure if it is possible the second reason you might want to use a double negative is a classic English reason it's because you want to be polite for example I can't say I don't hate him the maybe a different option would be to say I hate him I hate him but to be more polite okay to maneuver around this you can use multiple negatives I can't say I don't hate him the third reason is to create irony irony is the use of sarcasm to create humor to be funny so imagine that we are talking about George Clooney George Clooney is famous for being very very attractive but I could say he isn't unattractive and I'm using here the the double negative to create an ironic humor another reason is that the multiple negative gives us an opportunity to make a sentence longer it gives us an opportunity to add more emphasis I imagine that we are talking about somebody who is very likable he's very funny and attractive he's very likable I could say to you well he is likable but if I want to add that emphasis I want to make my my sentence longer with more power I could say well you can't not like him and using these multiple negatives actually increases the power of the verb like sometimes in English we have no option but to use the double negative because some words only exist in a negative form they have no positive form so we are forced to use multiple negatives okay for example the word indefinitely indefinitely means for a period of time that we don't know how long it is okay now definitely the positive form means something completely different so in this case we are forced we are obliged to use a multiple negative another reason is when we are replying to a previous statement so imagine if somebody says to you that is not true and you want to reply you can say it is not not true we are repeating the words back to them because we want to negate what they say we want to make negatives exactly what they said they said it's not true and we say that it is not not true the final reason that you might use the multiple negatives is because it's part of your dialect every day millions and millions of native English speakers use multiple negatives when they speak for example if you go to London or Ireland or Scotland or the south of America or Australia you will hear people say I ain't doing nothing here we have the double negative and the reason why is really interesting it's not because they don't know how to speak English properly or because they are uneducated it's because the oldest forms of a language survive the longest with a majority of people so you could say that when these people use multiple negatives and sentences they are using English like we used in Old English in Middle English you could say that it is a more pure form of English and the modern Latin influenced English that prohibits the double negative is a corruption so they are some ways that you can use multiple negatives to create an effect but use them carefully because some types of multiple negatives are not part of standard English and so you shouldn't use them in formal situations in in job interviews in formal letters in situations like this well I hope that this class was not uninteresting and now you can go and practice with your double negatives if you want to see any more classes about the English language then don't forget to not subscribe I'm Christian this is kangaroo English of the week class bye [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 19,223

Keywords: canguro, learning english, learn english, english grammar, grammar, double negative

Id: rUqQjNGH9ww

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2017