I understand his broader point about one dialect being chosen over another as "the correct one", due to where the political power was, but I don't understand why "can't get any" is a double-negative.
If "I can't get any satisfaction" and "I can't get no satisfaction" mean the same thing, and the words "I", "can't", "get", and "satisfaction" mean the same thing in both sentences, then necessarily, the words "no" and "any" mean the same thing in that context.
Whether or not a word is a "negative" is a question about its meaning. It's a negative, in that context, if it means the absence of something and not the presence of something.
Thus if "no" is a negative in "I can't get no satisfaction", then "any" is a negative in "I can't get any satisfaction".
I am not sure why but I suspect that the now-silent h in this word is a really modern change to English, and that not so very long ago hour was pronounced exactly the same way as it is still written today: [ˈhaʊə(ɹ)].
This does not appear to be the case. The word hour is ultimately from Latin hora, but it came into English through Anglo-Norman French, and (as tchrist said in a comment) we have evidence that the word lost the original [h] sound long before it ever entered English. The loss of Latin [h] occurred in all Romance languages, suggesting this loss was shared and therefore occurred early on. Furthermore, we have early spellings in Romance languages that lack the letter H. Any cases of the word being pronounced with /h/ in English must have originally been spelling pronunciations. It is very possible for a spelling pronunciation to spread and become established as the standard pronunciation of a word, but this does not seem to have ever happened for hour.
had the system of writing a for the indefinite article before a vowel sound and writing an for the indefinite article before a consonant sound not yet become standard during the 1700s?
This system had already developed centuries before then, although some small details of the system have changed over time (some details remain variable even today). The works of Shakespeare, created more than 200 years earlier, show the two forms a and an distributed based on whether the following sound is a consonant or a vowel.
The search tool at OpenSourceShakespeare shows a clear contrast between heart and hour, suggesting that in Shakespeare's time, as today, the first started with the consonant /h/ and the second started with a vowel:
- 39 total hits for "a heart" vs 0 total hits for "an heart"
- 0 total hits for "a hour" vs. 82 total hits for "an hour"
Caveat: I haven't consulted original documents of Shakespeare's work to check these results. Open Source Shakespeare is based on Moby Shakespeare, which normalizes the spellings of Shakespeare's words based on modern spelling. I'm not certain whether the use of a vs. an was affected by normalization according to the modern a vs. an rule; however, my guess is that it was not, as you can see from that search tool that Shakespeare's uses of "an hundred" (10 total hits there), which is nonstandard today, evidently have not just been normalized away to "a hundred".
Or is this just an incorrect and repeated typo in that page from The Literary Gazette from the 18th century?
It seems most probable that it is a typo, or if not, something similarly erratic. Note that you can find "an" used on the same page in "the run of an Hour-glass" and in "the time of an hour", so even though "a Hour-glass" appears more than once, it does not appear consistently in that text in place of "an Hour-glass". Therefore, the occurrence of three examples of "a Hour-glass" is puzzling, but not very clear evidence that "Hour-glass" was actually pronounced with /h/ by the author of that text.
Best Answer
The rise and fall of negative concord in English was a very long process.
Negative concord was present, but neither rare nor particularly common, in 'classical' OE. But at some time during the somewhat obscure transition from OE to ME the then OE negative particle ne was “weakened”, tending to narrow its scope in many cases from clausal to narrowly verbal negation. (Among the reasons conjectured for this are the particle's phonetic lightness and growing pressure from Scandinavian-influence northern forms.) This gave rise to an increased dependence on negative concord: a countervailing use of additional phrasal negators, particularly the new word not, which was originally a noun, a worn-down form of the noun nawiht > naught. Negative concord was ‘standard’ literary practice in the 13th and 14th centuries.
However, the phonetically heavier not almost entirely supplanted ne by the late 15th or early 16th century, and negative concord began to decline again. The process was accelerated in the 16th century with the growing literary use of non-assertive forms (e.g. any) as negative polarity items, and by Shakespeare's day negative concord was in rapid retreat. It had virtually disappeared from literary use by the Restoration.
With respect to Hamlet's use, the illustration below is of interest. It is drawn from T. Nevalainen, ‘Negative Concord as an English “Vernacular Universal”: Social history and linguistic typology’, Journal of English Linguistics 34, 2006, 257– 278, but I do not have access to this paper and I cannot vouch for its methodology or conclusions. I found it in this class handout from CUNY. It appears to show that it was the “social aspirers among the professionals” who drove the adoption of non-assertive forms, with the better sort lagging. This is hardly surprising—the Establishment, even when it is eager for literary innovation, is rarely the source of innovation itself—but it does seem to justify Shakespeare’s putting the old-fashioned use in Hamlet’s mouth.
Note that negative concord maintained a significant presence in the lower orders after the Restoration. It survives there to this day.