User talk:78.114.12.107

[1]: "can not is the possibility of negation; cannot is the impossibility"

-- They're actually interchangeable and both mean impossibility. "Can not" is accepted as the same usage of "not" as "has not," or "will not," to mean the total negation of the previous word (negative of "can," meaning impossibility), even though "can not" has the special possibility of working the other way around too (interpreting "can" as modifying "not", the way you have here as "possibly negated").

Signed, your friendly neighborhood grammar nazi :) Equazcion2 (talk) 03:00, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Hey that's exactly what I was thinking too! Then again, I've always been more of a descriptive kind of guy =P --Jesthel (talk) 03:28, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

See this and that. Even articles which support that cannot and can not are the same thing are full of comments by people making the same distinction as me. (And additionally, point out that "cannot" is preferred.) Further, if we do accept can not as synonymous to cannot, then we lose something semantically useful: the ability to express the possibility of a negation. For example: "Let's go to Camelot" can be countered by "on a second thought, let's not go to Camelot; it's a silly place." And so logically, with can: "We can go to Camelot" countered by "or we can not go to Camelot, it's a silly place and we'll be better off somewhere else."

The distinction exists in other languages, too. How would you translate the two following French sentences? "On peut ne pas y aller." "On ne peut pas y aller." The first express that we are not forced to go there; while the second express that it is impossible for us to go there. If cannot and can not are the same, then you cannot translate the first sentence without making a paraphrase.

I see primarily that this is a subject of disagreement among many so I won't put too fine a point on how many references we can each summon up; There's probably a repository for each viewpoint. As for the Camelot example, English speakers generally avoid the issue by saying "or we can go someplace else," or, "or we can stay home," at least in written text. The use of verbal emphasis to connote the difference, "or we can not go..." is generally only used in jest, at least in my experience.

English is full of idiosyncrasies, and just because a rule would limit the language doesn't mean it's not necessarily still the rule.

Case in point, if we say you're right and then switch it up with "could," to refer to the Camelot travel dilemma hypothetically, we run into a problem that apparently isn't solved yet with a similar combined word like "cannot": "Or we could not go to Camelot." If you're correct, wouldn't "could" still be modifying "not" here? How do we differentiate meanings?

Anyway, my final argument is simply that in practice nobody uses "can not" as you're suggesting it could be used, so it doesn't actually matter which form we choose. :) Equazcion2 (talk)