Re: "Shared" procedure division code


"Howard Brazee" <howard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dd8d56$1u7$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> On 8-Aug-2005, "Chuck Stevens" <charles.stevens@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > And if it's the fact that it's fundamentally a "verbed noun", the
practice
> > of verbing a noun has been a structural feature of English for a very
long
> > time. Some authorities on Proper English deem it anathema; others, who
> > seek to *describe* the language, recognize that it's part of the way the
> > language works -- just as "I ain't got no ..." is understandable in
casual
> > speech as a *single* negative, and just as everybody understands that a
> > preposition is not an incomprehensible thing to end a sentence with.
Both
> > proscriptions have their origins at medieval English universities, where
the
> > rules of *valid Latin* were presumed to apply to *proper English*.
>
> I was aware of the Latin basis for the silly prohibition of ending
sentences
> with preposition. You mentioned "both proscriptions" with "verbing a
noun" and
> with "double negatives". I know some romance languages use double
negatives.
> For my information, which of these are Latin impossibilities?

Nouns follow prepositions in Latin, and Latin doesn't have separable
prefixes. So far as I know, ending a sentence with a preposition is a
structural impossibility in Latin.

> (As a programmer, I dislike double negatives as negative - but that
doesn't mean
> I have an objection to using them in Spanish).

I'm not sure a native or near-native reader or speaker of Latin would
recognize a machine translation of something like "he ain't got no sense,
nohow" into that language (or for that matter, a number of other languages)
as having a *single* negative sense rather than *three* negative expressions
that have the cumulative result of negativity. Dropping the "nohow" at the
end has no effect on the overall negativity of the utterance to the average
native-English hearer; the argument about such multiple negatives in "proper
English" is that it *does* affect the sense, and "propriety" would demand
the use of one, and only one, negative indicator in the utterance.

-Chuck Stevens


.

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