1

I'm new at this forum and I love it already.

I had some doubts about the usage of "or" in terms of meaning.

If we have the sentence as follows:

"No student at your school can speak Russian or knows C++"

What does this really mean?

As far as I know, this means that there is an amount of students at my school and none of them speaks Russian. And, in addition, none of them knows C++.

However, today my English teacher told me that this means that there is an amount of students at my school and none of them speaks Russian or knows C++, but not both. Therefore, some students might not speak Russian but know C++, and some others might speak Russian but not know C++.

Is my teacher wrong? Or am I wrong? This doesn't make any sense to me.

Thank you.

Arnau
  • 133
  • Natural language is not like mathematics or formal logic; people will always be able to find ambiguity in a statement, and there is often more than one valid interpretation of any statement. This is one reason why legal language (for example, in official contracts) is so dense and overwritten. – choster Oct 10 '17 at 16:43
  • 2
    This is not a question about the usage of or; the sentence is ungrammatical and therefore doesn't mean anything, so it's not surprising it's confusing. A correct sentence meaning (what I suppose is) the same thing would be No student at your school can speak Russian or program C++, since Conjunction Reduction requires a parallel active infinitive verb in the second clause. This sentence is almost unambiguous, following DeMorgan's Laws; it takes an effort to understand it incorrectly. – John Lawler Oct 10 '17 at 17:58
  • @choster natural language is a LOT like formal logic in some cases (at least simple ones), and I think this is exactly such a case. It's almost unimaginable to me that a native English speaker would interpret the OP's sentence as the teacher did--if you wanted to express the teacher's meaning, you would say "and" instead of "or". – endemic Oct 10 '17 at 20:18
  • To add: I think I would have an ambiguous interpretation for a sentence that wasn't a negative, so that's interesting. – endemic Oct 13 '17 at 23:56
  • If your English teacher really said “amount of students”, you should find a new English teacher. – Scott - Слава Україні Oct 15 '17 at 04:53
  • "Amount of students" is not correct? – Arnau Oct 19 '17 at 13:00

0 Answers0