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Nepal's Kusunda language has no words for "yes" or "no"
- owens99 4y agoChinese doesn't either (technically). 好 = OK, 是 = Is, Both are used to mean yes 不要 = Don't want, 不用 = Don't need, Both are used to mean no
- math-dev 4y agoLisp (nothing is impossible)
- andsoitis 4y ago> It also has only one fluent speaker left I wonder how you can be a fluent speaker if you have nobody to talk to?
- pm215 4y agoThe usual way it works is that you grew up speaking it but everybody else who grew up with you speaking it as a first language died before you did...
- sgt101 4y agoDefinitely not prolog that would be a complete failure! see what I did there?
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- xchip 4y agoAs long as it uses NAND they are fine
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- throwaway2037 4y agoIt is amazing that no one yet has posted about the Japanese language. Yes, "technically" there is a term for "no" (いいえ). In practice, outside of official documentation, almost no one uses it in daily life. (When you fill official docs, はい==yes, and いいえ==no.) There are so many stupid Japanese language training books that teach you about "いいえ", but you will never hear it in the Real World, except during language trailing dialogs! Most Japanese people will say "違います" (chiigamasu / "it is different") to avoid saying "no" directly.
- yadaeno 4y agoIn verbal communication, you use the negative form of the verb in question instead. In computer dialogues you see いいえ, also if im not mistaken people say いいえ when they are flattered.
- hackernewds 4y agoWhat are the Japanese words in your comment?
- acid_burn 4y agoはい = "hai" = yes いいえ = "iie" = no
- mazlix 4y agoWhy do you say that? What’s your experience? I’ve spent years in Japan and live with 2 native Japanese and hear はい and いいえ all the time… When you give a Japanese person a compliment the most comment response IME is いいえ (nooo I’m not) And はい is said all the time
- bdowling 4y agoYouTuber That Japanese Man Yuta recently posted a good video explanation/exploration of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9JdP6pA5LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9JdP6pA5LY
- Tainnor 4y ago
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- kazinator 4y ago"Yes" and "No" are just shorthand forms of all sorts of longer sentences like: "What you said is true." "I agree with what you said." "What you said is false." "I will do what you said." "I will not do what you said." "I did that." "I didn't do that." "The ball is blue." "The ball isn't blue."
- pictureofabear 4y agoThis is not that unusual. Nepali also doesn't have a clean-cut yes/no translation.
- ericsoderstrom 4y agoEnglish is missing some seemingly basic answer words too, which are present in other languages. Like no single word for unambiguously answering a negative question. E.g. Q: Aren't you finished yet? Answering 'yes' or 'no' would be ambiguous
- mike_hock 4y ago"Aren't you finished, yet?" "Yes." "Is that yes, you aren't finished, or yes, you are finished?" "No." "Is that no, you aren't finished, or no, you are finished?" "Why did you ask me a yes or no question if neither yes nor no answers your question?"
- autoexec 4y agoSince the meaning of no and yes aren't good enough, what do the one word answers other countries have mean?
- archibaldJ 4y ago> When saying "I saw a bird" compared to "I will see a bird", a Kusunda speaker might indicate the past action not by tense, but by describing it as an experience directly related to the speaker. Meanwhile, the future action would remain general and not associated to any subject. Nothing strange about this. I think Chinese is similar too. The intention of the speaker is more important than the words he/she says. Related (and one of my fav papers in linguistics) - Interality as a Key to Deciphering Guiguzi: A Challenge to Critics https://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/3187 https://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/3187
- chinabot 4y agoA Great language for politicians then
- rakeshsharmak 4y agoMarathi, a language in the western part of India, does not have a word for thank you. Instead the word "aabhar" - roughly meaning indebted - is used. Thus, if I do something for you, then you respond with "aabhar", meaning I am indebted to you.
- kenneth 4y agoI'm learning Chinese, and it was also quite tricky to realize that it also does not have a word for yes and no. (Despite what translators will tell you, yes is not 是 (shi), no is not 不 (bu), rather 是 means 'to be' and 不 negates whatever verb comes after) Rather, Chinese responds indicates affirmative or negative by repeating the verb of the question in either plain or negated form. e.g. Q: Do you like hot pot? A: like | not like Q: ni xihuan huoguo ma? A: xihuan | bu xihuan Q: Do you have covid? A: have | not have Q: ni you mei you wuhan feiyan? A: you | meiyou Q: Are you american? A: is | is not Q: ni shi meiguoren ma? A: shi | bu shi etc. This was quite strange to get used to, but makes perfect sense once internalized.
- realPubkey 4y agoThis must be yaml
- messe 4y ago> Nepal's Kusunda language has no known origin and a number of quirks, like no words for "yes" or "no". That's not that uncommon, Scottish Gaelic and Irish, both spoken in the UK (take note British Broadcasting Corporation), have that same quirk—at least traditionally. There's some anecdotal evidence that with the number of non-native speakers learning the language, that Tá/Níl and Sea/Ní hea are starting to fill that gap in Irish. > including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, [...], or any words for direction. These are much more interesting features (or lack thereof)! Why wouldn't the article lead with that? EDIT: This is even funnier after seeing that the author even has a name of Scottish Gaelic/Irish origin: Eileen McDougall.
- w0mbat 4y agoI came here to mention Irish/Gaelic traditionally lacking "yes" and "no". This leads to replies that seem a bit verbose but are kind of charming, e.g. "Would you like a cup of tea?" "I would not".
- Ichthypresbyter 4y agoI think Tá/Níl were used (after some debate) as Yes/No on the Irish-language ballot papers in various recent constitutional referenda in Ireland. (Gaelic in Scotland does not have the same official status as Irish in Ireland or Welsh in Wales, so the Scottish independence referendum ballots were only in English.)
- messe 4y agoYes, they were. I can't remember the exact wording of the question, but I believe it was along the lines of "Are you in favour?" so the answer could be "I am/Tá", or "I am not/Níl". I could be wrong, so if somebody can remember the wording on the ballot paper, please don't hesitate to correct me.
- dorchadas 4y ago> There's some anecdotal evidence that with the number of non-native speakers learning the language, that Tá/Níl and Sea/Ní hea are starting to fill that gap in Irish. Only among non-natives or natives of the Neo-Irish that is starting to form outside the Gaeltacht. This is not a change that is happening, from my experience, in the Gaeltacht raised with traditional Irish speaking parents. It's really a sign of the weakening of the language.
- becquerel 4y agoThere are a lot of languages which don't have words which map neatly onto the English 'yes' and 'no'.
- BossingAround 4y agoYes, such as Chinese.
- shawabawa3 4y agoBut there's also no word for negation which is how Chinese gets around not having no
- SeanLuke 4y agoSure, Chineses has a word for negation. In cantonese, it's "mh", and can be attached to nearly every verb.
- bobthepanda 4y agoIn fact, in cantonese to say no you would just add negation to ‘yes’. hai/mh hai ‘Hai’ is basically used as yes but it’s actually the verb to be, so essentially yes is more like ‘{subject} is’.
- SeanLuke 4y agoSure but it's not just haih. For example, if I were to ask you if you have any snakes, in english, you'd say "no". But in Cantonese you'd say "mouh" (effectively mh yauh: "don't have" or "without").
- bobthepanda 4y agoOh okay, I think I get it now. (It's weird to think about grammar sometimes in a language you just grow up with.)
- linkdink 4y agohttps://youtu.be/x-Y2FHLGhEY https://youtu.be/x-Y2FHLGhEY Languages without yes and no are called echo languages. English used to be four-form with yes/no and yeah/nay, but now it's two-form.
- ogogmad 4y agoyeah should be yea, traditionally pronounced "yay"
- linkdink 4y agoYea autocorrect
- brutusborn 4y agoFor anyone who doesn't want to watch the whole video, yeah/nay is for answering 'negative' questions (e.g. "do you not like it?")
- laszlokorte 4y agoIn the video he says that "yes/no" are for negative questions and "yea/nay" are for positive questions.
- linkdink 4y agoThis is why people who are interested should just watch the video. It's only about 4 minutes of actual content.
- qsort 4y agoMost famously, Latin has no word for "yes". Different circumlocutions to say "yes" evolved into the words for "yes" in romance languages. "sic" -> si/sim (italian, spanish, portuguese) "hoc" -> oc (occitan) "hoc ille" -> oui (french)
- Tao3300 4y agoI was going to say that I was fairly sure Latin didn't have "yes", but I was a C student scraping by on the peripheral historical content rather than the language.
- schoen 4y agoOther circumlocutions that I don't think made it into any Romance languages: "ita" ('it is so', 'indeed') "ita vero" ('it is so, truly') "maxime" ('entirely') "valde" ('very much (so)') "vere" ('truly') There are great circumlocutions for "no". I remember Nancy Llewellyn had a whole list, including "haud quaquam" ('hardly/scarcely to any degree'), "nullo modo" and "nullo pacto" ('in no way'), and "nullactenus" ('to no extent'). Latin students are most often taught "minime" ('minimally', 'scarcely'). Without the circumlocutions I think you would simply do what so many other languages described here do, which is repeat the main verb of a question, either negated or not negated.
- pyuser583 4y agoNec/necque are a good way to negate in Latin.
- pyuser583 4y agoIn the 11th Century, Peter Abelard wrote a famous book called “Sic et Non” - which is always translated as “Yes and No.” Even in Classical Latin “ita” was pretty close to yes. I think an ancient Roman would understand and possibly use sic and ita much as we use “yes”. But it’s been a while. My Latin is rusty.
- messe 4y agoFrench has "si" from "sic" as well! Used in an affirmative response to a negative question. Pulling an example from wiktionary: Tu ne m’aimes pas, n’est-ce pas ? — Si ! You don’t like me, do you? — Yes, I do!
- SeanLuke 4y agoNot sure about Mandarin and other dialects, but Cantonese has no words for yes or no as well. Instead, cantonese speakers generally repeat the verb asked in a question in a positive or negative way, as in [Speaker A] Will you or will you not go to the dance? [Speaker B] Will not. Or in other circumstances they'll just use the be-verb ("haih"), or its negation ("mh-haih"); or the have-verb ("yauh") or its negation ("mouh") when appropriate.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoYes, it's the same in Mandarin.
- JamesSwift 4y agoSimilar in Mandarin (`shi` and `bu shi`), but you can also just use `shi` and `bu` by themselves. Not sure if thats just colloquial or what, I'm not a native speaker.
- SeanLuke 4y agoIn Cantonese you can't just say "mh" (the equivalent of "bu"). It's a negator like "not". You have to say "mh [verb]".
- thrdbndndn 4y agoSo.. newspeak?
- macleginn 4y agoAs usual, minority-language reporting is filled with weird formulations. > Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. Languages with no known relatives are called isolates, and there are a lot of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate And languages do not normally "originate", unless they are constructed, like Esperanto, or arise in unusual circumstances, like spontaneous sign languages in isolated deaf communities. > And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction. As pointed out in other comments, not having words for "yes" or "no" is not very surprising. As for a "standard way" of negating a sentence, I wonder what that means. Kusunda has negative verbal suffixes, which vary based on some grammatical features, but so do many other languages. Location and direction is also usually specified by suffixes like in, e.g., Hungarian or Finnish. See a grammatical overview for details: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83v8d1wv https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83v8d1wv
- Tainnor 4y agoThanks. Most people know exactly nothing about linguistics, but because everyone speaks a language, they feel qualified to talk about it. The results are mostly ridiculous to anyone actually trained in the field.
- dang 4y agoI'm sure all that's true (we see the same things in diet threads too - you eat food? no way, me too!) - but still, please don't post empty putdowns like this to HN. It just makes things worse. When you know more than others, the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so we all can learn. That's what macleginn did in the GP comment, making the thread much better. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thematrixturtle 4y agoSkepticism is usually warranted about claims that <super obscure language> has a <really unique feature> or doesn't have <really common concept>. Linguists like to publish this kind of thing because it's catchy, but many of these claims don't stand up to closer scrutiny. A few examples: * Daniel Everett made an entire career out of claiming various dubious things about the Piraha language, including that it has no colors other than light/dark, lacks recursion and has phonemes used in no other language on the planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Unusual_features_of_the_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Unusual_f... * Guugu Yimithirr supposedly only has absolute directions (north, west, etc, instead of left, right) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language
- Tainnor 4y agoNobody knows anything about Everett's claims, because they're so outlandish and nobody has been able to verify them. But the absolute directions in GY are well-established, and not really all that unusual cross-linguistically. Relative directions also play a minor role in a number of other smaller languages.
- macleginn 4y agoThe second claim is much less radical than the first one. In many small communities, absolute directions (often based on local landmarks rather than abstract cardinal directions) are perfectly reasonable, but these systems have to be recalibrated when speakers migrate. Viking migrations and their interaction with speakers of Greenlandic Inuit is an interesting case outside Australia: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2017.1317918 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2017.1...
- bradrn 4y agoThis is a problem with press coverage much more so than linguistics. As usual when they cover things they’re not familiar with, journalists often wildly exaggerate these claims to make them sound more interesting. By contrast, from what I’ve seen of the linguistic literature, actual linguists tend to be fairly measured in their assessments of languages, and generally support their arguments with evidence. For instance, we have more than enough evidence that Guugu Yimithirr really does only have absolute directions [0]; there are of course some subtleties in how they are applied, but either way it undoubtedly has no words corresponding to relative directions. This isn’t even too rare, either — e.g. many languages of Vanuatu are exactly the same [1]. Everett is the only case I can think of where there genuinely has been the sort of wild exaggeration more often found in the press. (Though even there, I suspect his critics have been looking rather more at the predictions of Chomskyan formal syntax than at what’s actually happening. It wouldn’t be the first time.) [0] Haviland 2008, Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 [1] François 2005, The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-Vanuatu-space-directionals.pdf http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-...