6 ms·

This is like saying 'yes' exists in all languages because there's an equivalent in every language... It's... a bit clikbaity

cgsullivan 6y ago
Irish doesn't have words for "yes" and "no" -- answers must echo the verb: "Are you okay?" "Am." "Did you tell him to come over?" "Didn't tell."
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  Unsurprisingly, it's similar in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. Mandarin and Cantonese (and probably other Sinitic languages) don't either, with much the same arrangement as the Celtic languages.
  - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
    No Shi? I had no idea about Mandarin.
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      Shi means "is", not "yes" in Mandarin.
      - singularity2001 6y ago
        who sais yes isn't a contraction of i'is
        r0rshrk 6y ago
        Surprisingly, this is partially true. It's a contraction but an older one. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes
    - chrischen 6y ago
      There are many yes-like words, but not exactly "yes". There's "it is", "it's correct", and "it's good" that may be used depending on context to mean yes.
  - unfunco 6y ago
    In Welsh there's (Nag-)Ydw and (Nag-)Oes, and Dim.
  - v-yadli 6y ago
    Enter 嗯(polyphonic)： ng1: indeed, so what? ng2: huh? ng3: what? ng4: yeah, yes. ng~: nooo.
- jawns 6y ago
  Amazing! I wonder about the universality of head nods (for yes) and head shakes (for no), and whether languages that lack a "yes" or "no" might still use nods.
  - axegon_ 6y ago
    Not universal, a few exceptions[1] : > There are several exceptions: in Greece, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria,[2] Albania, and Sicily a single nod of the head up (not down) indicates a "no". Though for Bulgaria at least it seems it's shifting with many people who lived abroad at some point(myself included) and have picked up the correct/more universal form. Which makes it worse: Now no one really knows whether you mean yes or no... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nod_(gesture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nod_(gesture)
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      There's also the head bobble, common in south India, which looks a lot like an ongoing head shake but generally means something like ongoing agreement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble
      - pessimizer 6y ago
        Referring to it as "ongoing agreement" reminds me of something I think of as the "confessional no." When addicts talk about their addiction, there's often a rhythmic shaking of the head from side to side like a continual "no," but that speeds up and slows down with some relationship to the grammar of the sentences used. You can probably make yourself do it by saying out loud: "When I was young, I thought I understood everything." It's like an ongoing disagreement.
fiblye 6y ago
What's being argued here is like saying "french" and "francais" are completely unrelated words because they sound different, despite being somewhat similar in sound and having a clear shared origin and meaning. You can go pretty much anywhere on earth and say "huh? uh? ummm?" in response to something that you don't understand and people will get that you don't understand. Say another word, like "Great", and they might not know that you're affirming whatever they said. And "yes" doesn't exist in all languages. Many languages require the speaker to repeat back part of the statement or the verb to affirm something.
tomrod 6y ago
Agreed. On the topic, sí seems to be yes, but backwards.
- axegon_ 6y ago
  Да `Da` :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
choeger 6y ago
If I am not mistaken, there is no "yes" in classic Latin.
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  I was taught "ita vero" for yes and "minime vero" for no during Latin lessons at school.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Latin had a few ways to affirm or negate. Both "ita" (it is) and the more forceful "ita vero" (it is true) could be used for yes, but you could also repeat the verb from the question with modification to affirm. "Have you eaten?" -> "I have eaten." For negation you could do the same verb-repeating, but add "non" to negate.
- Jakob 6y ago
  You are correct. In fact old English didn’t have it as well. "Yes" comes from "gese" which means "So be it".
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    According to wiktionary entry on Yea. From Middle English ye, ȝea, ya, ȝa, from Old English ġēa, iā (“yea, yes”), from Proto-Germanic ja (“yes, thus, so”), from Proto-Indo-European yē (“already”) Wiktionary about yes says From Middle English yes, yis, from Old English ġēse, ġīse, ġȳse, ġīese (“yes, of course, so be it”), equivalent to ġēa (“yes", "so”) + sī(e) (“may it be”), from Proto-Indo-European yē (“already”). Compare yea. So "yes", seeming so simple, was once a compound word.
tgv 6y ago
What they mean is that all languages have a similar sounding, very short morpheme to signal repair. That's quite the language universal.
derefr 6y ago
Different languages have different ways of recording/formalizing what are fundamentally the same onomatopoeic inspirations, though. In English, frogs croak; in Japanese, they kerokero. It’s clear that the same sound is being portrayed there, just broken up differently due to English having an alphabet where Japanese has an abugida. Neither language’s encoding from the source “sound of a frog croaking” to a word is lossless, because humans can’t make that exact sound with their vocal cords; and so none of our systems of talking about sounds, be they written languages, spoken languages, or formalisms like IPA, can contain a good representation of the required movements. But both languages above get close enough that we can recognize the sound being referred to from its per-language encoding when we hear it spoken, and from there, know what the word is, even without speaking the relevant language. The idea here is that there is a thing humans can communicate by making the sound of their language’s equivalent word for “huh?”, which speakers of all other human languages can equally recognize as having the same meaning as their own language’s word “huh?”, without understanding anything about the language being spoken. That communicability is what effectively makes the words “the same” word. It’s not really that the word (written symbol; exact spoken phonemes) for “huh?” is the same between languages. It’s the abstract sound pattern that’s the same. Just like a frog’s croak, as an abstract sound pattern, is the same as any other frog’s croak, and unlike anything that’s not a frog’s croak. The difference is that all humans can make a “huh?” noise; and so we do get perfect mutual intelligibility out of it. We don’t manage to represent the “sound that ‘huh?’ makes” well in human languages; but when we say it, we still say it the “right” (mutually-intelligible) way nevertheless.
yellowapple 6y ago
The argument is that the word for "huh" in all languages can be traced to some common ancestor language. "eh" and "huh" are very similar phonetically, and could readily evolve from one to the other or from some common ancestor that's neither).

cgsullivan 6y ago

Irish doesn't have words for "yes" and "no" -- answers must echo the verb: "Are you okay?" "Am." "Did you tell him to come over?" "Didn't tell."

DonaldFisk 6y ago
Unsurprisingly, it's similar in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. Mandarin and Cantonese (and probably other Sinitic languages) don't either, with much the same arrangement as the Celtic languages.
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  No Shi? I had no idea about Mandarin.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Shi means "is", not "yes" in Mandarin.
    - singularity2001 6y ago
      who sais yes isn't a contraction of i'is
      - r0rshrk 6y ago
        Surprisingly, this is partially true. It's a contraction but an older one. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes
  - chrischen 6y ago
    There are many yes-like words, but not exactly "yes". There's "it is", "it's correct", and "it's good" that may be used depending on context to mean yes.
- unfunco 6y ago
  In Welsh there's (Nag-)Ydw and (Nag-)Oes, and Dim.
- v-yadli 6y ago
  Enter 嗯(polyphonic)： ng1: indeed, so what? ng2: huh? ng3: what? ng4: yeah, yes. ng~: nooo.
jawns 6y ago
Amazing! I wonder about the universality of head nods (for yes) and head shakes (for no), and whether languages that lack a "yes" or "no" might still use nods.
- axegon_ 6y ago
  Not universal, a few exceptions[1] : > There are several exceptions: in Greece, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria,[2] Albania, and Sicily a single nod of the head up (not down) indicates a "no". Though for Bulgaria at least it seems it's shifting with many people who lived abroad at some point(myself included) and have picked up the correct/more universal form. Which makes it worse: Now no one really knows whether you mean yes or no... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nod_(gesture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nod_(gesture)
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    There's also the head bobble, common in south India, which looks a lot like an ongoing head shake but generally means something like ongoing agreement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      Referring to it as "ongoing agreement" reminds me of something I think of as the "confessional no." When addicts talk about their addiction, there's often a rhythmic shaking of the head from side to side like a continual "no," but that speeds up and slows down with some relationship to the grammar of the sentences used. You can probably make yourself do it by saying out loud: "When I was young, I thought I understood everything." It's like an ongoing disagreement.

fiblye 6y ago

What's being argued here is like saying "french" and "francais" are completely unrelated words because they sound different, despite being somewhat similar in sound and having a clear shared origin and meaning. You can go pretty much anywhere on earth and say "huh? uh? ummm?" in response to something that you don't understand and people will get that you don't understand. Say another word, like "Great", and they might not know that you're affirming whatever they said. And "yes" doesn't exist in all languages. Many languages require the speaker to repeat back part of the statement or the verb to affirm something.

tomrod 6y ago

Agreed. On the topic, sí seems to be yes, but backwards.

axegon_ 6y ago
Да `Da` :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

choeger 6y ago

If I am not mistaken, there is no "yes" in classic Latin.

DonaldFisk 6y ago
I was taught "ita vero" for yes and "minime vero" for no during Latin lessons at school.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Latin had a few ways to affirm or negate. Both "ita" (it is) and the more forceful "ita vero" (it is true) could be used for yes, but you could also repeat the verb from the question with modification to affirm. "Have you eaten?" -> "I have eaten." For negation you could do the same verb-repeating, but add "non" to negate.
Jakob 6y ago
You are correct. In fact old English didn’t have it as well. "Yes" comes from "gese" which means "So be it".
- im3w1l 6y ago
  According to wiktionary entry on Yea. From Middle English ye, ȝea, ya, ȝa, from Old English ġēa, iā (“yea, yes”), from Proto-Germanic ja (“yes, thus, so”), from Proto-Indo-European yē (“already”) Wiktionary about yes says From Middle English yes, yis, from Old English ġēse, ġīse, ġȳse, ġīese (“yes, of course, so be it”), equivalent to ġēa (“yes", "so”) + sī(e) (“may it be”), from Proto-Indo-European yē (“already”). Compare yea. So "yes", seeming so simple, was once a compound word.

tgv 6y ago

What they mean is that all languages have a similar sounding, very short morpheme to signal repair. That's quite the language universal.

derefr 6y ago

Different languages have different ways of recording/formalizing what are fundamentally the same onomatopoeic inspirations, though. In English, frogs croak; in Japanese, they kerokero. It’s clear that the same sound is being portrayed there, just broken up differently due to English having an alphabet where Japanese has an abugida. Neither language’s encoding from the source “sound of a frog croaking” to a word is lossless, because humans can’t make that exact sound with their vocal cords; and so none of our systems of talking about sounds, be they written languages, spoken languages, or formalisms like IPA, can contain a good representation of the required movements. But both languages above get close enough that we can recognize the sound being referred to from its per-language encoding when we hear it spoken, and from there, know what the word is, even without speaking the relevant language. The idea here is that there is a thing humans can communicate by making the sound of their language’s equivalent word for “huh?”, which speakers of all other human languages can equally recognize as having the same meaning as their own language’s word “huh?”, without understanding anything about the language being spoken. That communicability is what effectively makes the words “the same” word. It’s not really that the word (written symbol; exact spoken phonemes) for “huh?” is the same between languages. It’s the abstract sound pattern that’s the same. Just like a frog’s croak, as an abstract sound pattern, is the same as any other frog’s croak, and unlike anything that’s not a frog’s croak. The difference is that all humans can make a “huh?” noise; and so we do get perfect mutual intelligibility out of it. We don’t manage to represent the “sound that ‘huh?’ makes” well in human languages; but when we say it, we still say it the “right” (mutually-intelligible) way nevertheless.

yellowapple 6y ago

The argument is that the word for "huh" in all languages can be traced to some common ancestor language. "eh" and "huh" are very similar phonetically, and could readily evolve from one to the other or from some common ancestor that's neither).