On Negation in Chinglish

Here is a document, relating to Esperanto, that I just uploaded to my ipernity account. (When visiting my ipernity account, remember that I use the name “Michael Esperanto Jones”.)

On Negation in Chinglish

Negation, even under ideal circumstances, can be a tricky matter, as exemplified by the ambiguity of the sentence:

“The bicycle is not new and registered.”

Is the bicycle registerd?

(Perhaps the most (in)famous example of difficulty linked to negation is Russell’s paradox: the set of all sets not belonging to themselves belongs to itself if, and only if, it does not belong to itself.)

Negation handled incorrectly by a learner of English leads to even deeper ambiguity: the failure to distinguish between grammatical moods. A good example is the pair of sentences:

“Don’t close the door.”

and

“You didn’t close the door.”

Both of which are rendered by the Chinglish sentence

“You not close door.”

Thus, the problem, a serious semantic problem, is that Chinglish handling of negation fails to distinguish between the imperative mood and the indicative mood. The seriousness of the problem lies mainly in the fact that the indicative mood may imply an imperative that is the opposite of the explicit imperative, as in the example above. (That is “You didn’t close the door.” suggests that you SHOULD close the door.)

This is a case (one of a vast multitude) where a bit of Esperanto can eliminate confusion (and confusion, Francis Bacon pointed out, not mere error, is the great barrier to progress). Ask the speaker to give the intended sentence in Esperanto. (The speaker does not have to be an adept of Esperanto. Merely picking through a textbook and dictionary would suffice.) Unlike in English, the speaker must choose between different words: “fermu” (imperative form of “close”) and “fermis” (past tense form of “close”) for the two instances of the word “close”. If the speaker tries to straddle the fence with the infinitive “fermi”, that would be obvious, and forbidden. Thus, the explicit grammar-coding in Esperanto can be a great aid in using a foreign language.

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