The difficulties of cross cultural communication.

[Igel]

77. The post in question is pointing out that how you approach a text influences you're interpretation.

If he approaches something like "no hice nada" (my example, not his) it looks like a double negative.

As a formal logician, he could draw the conclusion that the predicate "did nothing" is being denied. In other words, it wasn't nothing that I did--which entails that I did something. Hence a double negative. It's a show of ill-will, because the context would clearly imply that the speaker was saying that nothing was precisely what I did do.


It's the same with cross-cultural communication. If you take your presuppositions and ways on interpreting things with you and insist that what they say meet your assumptions and criteria for parsing, you commit an act of ill will. You are intentionally denying the other's frame of reference as a valid starting point even for understanding what the other person meant. "Hubris" is the word that comes to mind, but since nobody ever bothers to double check it means the ignorance self-inflicted by a subset of self-proclaimed enlightened ones continues. It really is all about the self.


(The linguist in me sticks with something like a more traditional view--in Spanish, as in many other languages, you get either words like "nada" and "ningun" being redundant intensifiers, simply making clear that it really is a negative that's being said; or when I put on my theoretician's cap you have a kind of feature checking and negative concord, so that negation is redundantly marked on multiple words that are controlled by negation. In Russian, "Nikto moei komandy nikogda nichego ne delal plokhogo" with all those negative ni- and that ne can only mean "Nobody on my team ever did anything bad," even if it looks like "nobody on my team never didn't do nothing bad". Notice in standard American English you only get one negation, and the usual constraint was that it was raised as early in the sentence as possible. "Everybody didn't understand this" to my ears can only mean "nobody understood this" while for most of the teens I know it means "Not everybody understood this." Language changes.)