Shakespeare most certainly did speak, and write, Modern English. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_English . If your claim is that he did not speak an identical dialect to you, well, neither do many English speakers who use double negatives for emphasis (or because they are grammatically required) every day.
This is ludicrous. The language spoken by Shakespeare was undoubtedly and clearly different from anything regularly spoken today, and nearly unintelligible to any English speaker without an interest in Shakespeare or older forms of English. If that is not a different language, then what objective basis do you have for saying that AAVE is a different language?
To be clear, Shakespeare did not speak American Standard English (or any dialect of English currently spoken). However, as I replied to your sibling, the English that he spoke is not more different from ASE than many other dialects of modern English, and is much closer than some. (Where it differed is primarily in orthography, as the last thing to be standardized in English was spelling, which makes the difference when reading text seem much greater.)
As noted elsewhere in these comments, the distinction between a language and a dialect is primarily a political one (and some linguists reject it entirely). However, there is a clear line between between Middle English and Modern English which does not exist between Elizabethan and American Standard, and that's why I say the original claim is false.
If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.
I said "modern English", not "Modern English". The fact that Wikipedia defines a term "Modern English" to mean English spoken since ~1550 is quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Wikipedia, referencing the science of linguistics. And it ain't a scare capital, they call it Modern because it is. English spoken since the Great Vowel Shift does not differ from English spoken today any more than dialects of English spoken today differ from each other.
If you want to claim that Shakespeare did not speak modern English, capitalized or non, you will need to specify exactly what you think you mean, because the statement as written is just not true.
The entire context of this discussion is a concrete example of how the language spoken by Shakespeare does in fact differ from the standard English spoken today. But instead of recognizing this fact, you are trying to turn this argument into one over the meaning of the term "modern english", which is completely pointless.
> If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.
The point of this entire thread is that what you are calling "standard English" is not a thing. It's not what Shakespeare spoke and it's not what we speak. There is American Standard, the dialect primarily spoken on the news in the US and elsewhere, but that is one of dozens. Many of those, including the Elizabethan spoken by Shakespeare and ethnolects spoken my many millions of people today, employ double negatives for emphasis. You are trying to draw an old/new distinction which does not reflect reality.
