[HN Gopher] Nepal's Kusunda language has no words for "yes" or "no"
___________________________________________________________________
Nepal's Kusunda language has no words for "yes" or "no"
Author : benbreen
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-08-10 15:13 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| messe wrote:
| > 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 Ta/Nil and Sea/Ni 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.
| becquerel wrote:
| Harder to make snappy for a headline, I guess! I agree that
| these qualities are much more interesting.
| nailer wrote:
| Dad spoke Irish at home (Galway) and uses Hibernian E English.
|
| "Are you posting on Hacker News?"
|
| "I am."
|
| Easy.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > There's some anecdotal evidence that with the number of non-
| native speakers learning the language, that Ta/Nil and Sea/Ni
| 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.
| messe wrote:
| > This is not a change that is happening, from my experience,
| in the Gaeltacht raised with traditional Irish speaking
| parents.
|
| Of which there are less and less of. I think the only way
| Irish can survive in the long term is in a semi-creolized
| form with a lot of English influence. It's all well and good
| trying to codify a variety of "proper Irish", but
| realistically if it is to gain any amount of new speakers,
| it's going to have significant influence from the native
| languages of those new speakers--which will be English.
|
| This isn't unnatural. Languages are influenced by non-native
| speakers all the time. See English: a Germanic language with
| much of its vocabulary derived from Norman French, Latin, and
| Greek, and a loss of almost all inflection save for some
| irregular verbs, and referring to ships in the feminine.
|
| Look, I'd like as much as the next person to preserve Irish
| as native speakers speak it, but the chance to do that died
| over a century ago.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > I think the only way Irish can survive in the long term
| is in a semi-creolized form with a lot of English
| influence.
|
| Then that's _not_ Irish. It 's a Neo-Irish creole. Which is
| fine -- great even! -- but let's call it what it is.
|
| > See English: a Germanic language with much of its
| vocabulary derived from Norman French, Latin, and Greek,
| and a loss of almost all inflection save for some irregular
| verbs, and referring to ships in the feminine.
|
| There's a huge difference between what's going on with
| Irish and what happened with English under Norman rule. For
| instance, the sound system is still fairly Germanic, the
| grammar most definitely is. Both these things are being
| lost in Neo-Irish.
|
| > Look, I'd like as much as the next person to preserve
| Irish as native speakers speak it, but the chance to do
| that died over a century ago.
|
| I think there is still a chance, if radical steps are
| taken. Sadly, you're right; they won't be taken.
|
| I'm fine with _something_ surviving, but we need to be
| honest about what it is, and how the State has failed those
| who actually speak traditional Irish and all but guaranteed
| its death, thanks, in part, to the way it implemented it in
| the schools. It should 've always been a Gaeltacht outward
| revival.
| Macha wrote:
| Do you want to have the language as a living language or as a
| fossilized relic? It's long been a complaint of the gaelgoir
| crowd that Irish people do not use the Irish language and
| they're losing touch with the culture.
|
| A consequence of the push for more widespread usage of the
| language that came from that is that a language in use
| evolves. Even English language media from 50 years ago is
| markedly different in the way the language is used.
|
| So I feel the influence of the Duolingo/meetup generation of
| Irish language speakers is both inevitable and arguably a
| sign of the increased uptake of the language - if such people
| were small in number compared to the traditional speakers,
| they could not have had this outsized influence.
|
| Also in the case of Ta/Nil as Yes/No in particular, the roots
| of that probably also have something to do with bilingual
| government forms adopting it as a space saving measure, so
| these new speakers have a lifetime of seeing Ta/Yes and
| Nil/No options on professionally translated forms that may
| also have primed this development.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > Do you want to have the language as a living language or
| as a fossilized relic?
|
| I want to see it remain a living language. I _don 't_ want
| to see it becoming, as it is in idiom, sounds and grammar,
| "English in Irish drag" (quoting a prominent linguist on
| the matter). It's _not_ Irish. It 's people substituting
| Irish words into English grammar, using English sounds and
| idioms to do so. _That 's_ the death of Irish.
|
| > It's long been a complaint of the gaelgoir crowd that
| Irish people do not use the Irish language and they're
| losing touch with the culture.
|
| There's a huge difference between the 'gaelgoir' crowd and
| native speakers (none of whom would call themselves
| Gaeilgeoiri -- those are specifically the learners who come
| in with notebooks or to the summer schools).
|
| > A consequence of the push for more widespread usage of
| the language that came from that is that a language in use
| evolves. Even English language media from 50 years ago is
| markedly different in the way the language is used.
|
| There's a difference between language evolution and
| language death. There's also a difference between learners
| not learning properly and native speakers changing the
| language naturally (.i. _not_ under conditions of language
| death)
|
| > So I feel the influence of the Duolingo/meetup generation
| of Irish language speakers is both inevitable and arguably
| a sign of the increased uptake of the language - if such
| people were small in number compared to the traditional
| speakers, they could not have had this outsized influence.
|
| The problem is the shitty level of Irish held by most
| school teachers, even those in the Gaelscoileanna. And
| their ignorance on proper Irish idiom, grammar and sounds
| that then gets passed on.
|
| > Also in the case of Ta/Nil as Yes/No in particular, the
| roots of that probably also have something to do with
| bilingual government forms adopting it as a space saving
| measure, so these new speakers have a lifetime of seeing
| Ta/Yes and Nil/No options on professionally translated
| forms that may also have primed this development.
|
| And those forms are purposefully translated so that Ta/Yes
| Nil/No is an answer to an "An bhfuil" question, following
| proper Irish grammar (usually "An bhfuil tu i bhfabhar
| ...").
|
| But, natural language change is _not_ what 's happening
| with Irish. Instead, we're seeing a split between the
| traditional Gaeltacht raised native speakers and a
| pidgin/creole forming in the urban areas. Sadly, only one
| can survive and it's less and less likely it'll be
| traditional Irish. Instead, we'll be left with something
| that calls itself Irish, but is really no different from
| English in the way it expresses concepts, the sounds it
| uses to express those concepts and, outside perhaps the
| _very_ basics, the grammar it uses to express those
| concepts. The only thing different is the words it uses.
| That 's _not_ Irish.
|
| You'd never see this happening with any majority language
| -- French speakers would be rightfully up in arms if
| someone spoke French with English sounds, used English
| grammar and then claimed their French was just as authentic
| as the natives'. Sadly, we accept it -- _praise_ it -- for
| Irish. At the expense of the traditional, rich native
| language and the Gaelic worldview (assuming linguistic
| relativity and /or cognitive metaphors shape the way we
| think; I lean towards the latter)
| rkachowski wrote:
| I was taught in school that "tha" and "chan eil" are yes / no
| in Gaelic
| mjklin wrote:
| In fact filmmaker Manchan Magan had to borrow the English word
| "no" to title his documentary "No Bearla" (No English) in which
| he roamed Ireland attempting to speak only Irish.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Bearla
| Macha wrote:
| I think that's pretty much to be a bit more harsh on Irish
| people who don't speak Irish, and also to be more
| recognisable as a title to non-Irish speakers (who would
| likely at least still recognise Bearla from years of Irish
| lessons).
|
| "Gan Bearla" or "Without English" would have been an equally
| short title without resorting to a bilingual title.
| tgv wrote:
| So how do these languages (Scottish Gaelic and Irish) express
| affirmation and negation then? I couldn't find it on Wikipedia.
| I can imagine that affirmation would be a repeated variation on
| the question, as some languages do (e.g., "Have you got your
| ticket?" "I have it"), but negation?
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| In Scottish Gaelic you'd use "Tha" or "Chan eil" to literally
| say "yes" or "no".
|
| "Tha" - pronounced like "Haa" - is more like "It is" or "I
| am", "A'bheil thu sgith?" "Tha, tha mi sgith." "Are you
| tired?" "Yes, I am tired".
|
| "Chan eil" - the "ch" is like in "loch", that back-of-the-
| throat sound, and "eil" is like "ale" - is a syntactically
| gendered form of "Cha" and "bheil", where the "bh" pronounced
| a bit like a "v" is dropped and an "n" is added.
| "Syntactically gendered" isn't like male female person
| gender, it's like plug socket gender - you can't say "Cha
| eil" because there's a stupid-sounding stop in it, like you
| can't say "a apple". You'd say "*an* apple" so you've got a
| consonant between the vowel sounds.
|
| But yeah in general I'd ask you "Are you hungry?" and you'd
| say "I'm not" or "I am" rather than "No" or "Yes".
|
| Of course modern Gaelic is a heavily code-switched language
| so you'd probably just use "No" or "Yes" directly anyway if
| you were speaking in a modern idiom.
| messe wrote:
| Hmm. If I asked the following (forgive my spelling/grammar,
| it's be a while since I've studied Scottish Gaelic, so I've
| probably fecked up the mutations and question particle,
| I've put what I intend it to mean in English)
|
| > Am bidh thu sgith? _Are you tired? (regularly)_
|
| Would you answer "Bidh", "Tha", or "Tha, bidh mi sgith"?
| messe wrote:
| There is a word that negates a sentence/clause, just not a
| word for no. You're correct that we repeat the verb (ta is
| the independent form when no particle precedes it, fuil is
| the dependent form, which here has an initial mutation adding
| bh to its beginning). "Have you got your ticket?":
| - An bhfuil do thicead agat? (LIT: is your
| ticket at-you?) - (interrogative) is your ticket
| at-you? - Ta mo thicead agam. - is my
| ticket at-me.
|
| In the negative, we'd use the particle Ni and the form fhuil:
| Ni-fhuil (lit: Not-is) which is nowadays written and
| pronounced as Nil: - Nil mo thicead
| agam. - Ni-fhuil - not-is my ticket at-me.
|
| Another example using a more regular verb: "do you sing?"
| - An gcanann tu? - (interrogative) sing
| you? - Canann me / Canaim - sing I /
| sing-1st.pres - Ni chanann me / Ni chanaim
| - not sing I / not sing-1st.pres
|
| Note that there are two forms an analytic and a synthetic
| form that incorporates the pronoun into the verb that can be
| used depending on dialect and speaker. I've included both
| above.
|
| EDIT: Unfortunately, code blocks are necessary for alignment,
| so I've added '-' to the beginning of each line to aid in
| legibility on mobile.
| tgv wrote:
| Thanks, most informative.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| You should know that your code blocks are complete
| gibberish on mobile browsers.
| messe wrote:
| Apologies. I'm aware of the issues with code blocks on
| mobile, and I myself even call people out who used them
| instead of quotes. Here though, I used text alignment to
| aid in showing which words in Irish correspond to their
| translation in English, so a monospaced font was
| necessary as HN doesn't provide any other means of
| alignment.
|
| EDIT: I viewed my comment on mobile, and I don't think
| it's completely gibberish as the commenter suggested. I
| use a relatively small phone (an iPhone SE 2020), and
| found it readable. That said, I've added '-' to the
| beginning of each line to aid in legibility for anybody
| experiencing issues.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Apart from Donegal, you won't really find the analytic
| first person singular present anywhere outside of the verbs
| ta and bionn. Even in Donegal, the synthetic is best.
|
| Also, you don't have to repeat the pronoun (unless it is
| one with the analytic form).
|
| An gcanann se? Canann.
| messe wrote:
| > Apart from Donegal, you won't really find the analytic
| first person singular anywhere outside of the verbs ta
| and bionn
|
| Have you mixed up analytic and synthetic? Analytic =
| Canann me, Synthetic = canaim. Ulster irish generally
| tends toward analytic (similar to Scottish Gaelic
| actually), and Munster tends toward the Synthetic.
|
| > Also, you don't have to repeat the pronoun (unless it
| is one with the analytic form).
|
| True, but I didn't want to complicate it any further than
| it already was.
| dorchadas wrote:
| No, the synthetic first person singular present tense is
| still more prevalent, even in Donegal. Overall, yes,
| Donegal (the only living Ulster dialects, as I'm sure
| you're aware) tends towards analytic, but they're not
| that common in some tenses. _An Teanga Bheo: Gaeilge
| Uladh_ (horrible name, East Ulster was very different
| from Donegal!) mentions that you can say _canann me_ but
| that _canaim_ is still preferred. Same with a few of the
| persons in the conditional mood.
| messe wrote:
| Ah yeah, that makes sense. I glossed over "first person
| singular" in the part I quoted.
| davidw wrote:
| > Canann
|
| Interesting; same root as Italian 'cantare'.
| messe wrote:
| Yep! They both come from Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
| keh2n-.
|
| As a matter of fact, the Italic and Celtic branches of
| PIE are posited to be closer than to each other than
| other Indo-European branches and are often grouped
| together as Italo-Celtic.
| bergenty wrote:
| Sounds like most of them just negate the operative verb in
| the question.
|
| Do you have a pen? Have Not have
| raverbashing wrote:
| > as some languages do (e.g., "Have you got your ticket?" "I
| have it"), but negation?
|
| They say "I haven't it" (they negate the verb)
|
| (Which in English sound weird, but you can negate the verb
| without using 'no')
| Macha wrote:
| I mean practically Nil on its own is no in actual spoken
| Irish, but that is a relatively recent usage that came
| about because approximately all Irish speakers learned
| English as a first language and want to import the usage.
|
| But yes, officially and historically the correct response
| was like "Nil aon tickead agam" or "There is no ticket on
| me", or less directly translated/less awkwardly "I don't
| have a ticket"
| derriz wrote:
| Really? This must be a very recent change. If your
| teacher asked you "An dTuigeann Tu?" ("do you
| understand?"), they would accept "Nil" as an answer? It
| sounds horribly off to me.
| messe wrote:
| It depends on the speaker, the usage is much more common
| among people who haven't learned the language to any
| degree of fluency (which is the majority of people who
| claim to speak Irish). Hearing "Nil" in response to a
| question that didn't involve "An bhfuil?" still sounds
| off to me, but languages change over time.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > but languages change over time.
|
| I would argue there's a difference between natural
| language change among natives and language change because
| learners can't/won't learn something right. What we're
| actually seeing isn't language change, but language shift
| (in the Gaeltacht), where Irish loses all that separates
| it from English as English creeps in, and language
| _formation_ (outside the Gaeltacht) as a sort of Gaelo-
| Anglo pidgin /creole is being formed.
| Mannybilbao wrote:
| As a Spaniard living in Ireland I couldn't detect much
| difference in how the Irish I heard at the popup
| gaeltacht event sounded compared to English as a language
| (though when I first visited Kerry I thought some of the
| older men were speaking Gaelic because of how they spoke
| English)
|
| I'd expect people to not want their Irish to sound so
| like English (jibberish English like the Simms) but it
| doesn't seem to be something learners or educationists
| care about or are aware of
| dorchadas wrote:
| Honestly, most people don't know and don't care. They use
| their little phrase 'Broken Irish is better than clever
| English' to hide/dismiss any concerns as well. It's a
| huge issue though -- the native sounds are dying, and
| learners are killing them. Put off by saying "Oh, it's
| just my dialect" (it's not, you're not a native speaker;
| you don't _have_ a dialect!)
| messe wrote:
| There's two factors there though. The first is how
| English accents in those localities have been influenced
| by historic use of Irish there. The second is how the
| accents learners of Irish are now being influenced by
| English phonetics.
|
| The biggest problem with the latter is a lot of learners
| don't grasp the Slender/Broad consonants distinction at
| all (it's a palatilization/velarization distinction
| similar to the soft/hard distiction in Slavic languages).
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| When I visited Ireland, one of the defining
| characteristics of the Irish dialect of English was the
| absence of yes/no - it definitely stood out to me that
| people would respond to stuff like "did you eat lunch?"
| with "I did".
|
| Weird to see that not only has yes/no come into the
| English spoken in Ireland, but is now being backported to
| the Gaelic.
| Asraelite wrote:
| I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make.
| "I haven't it" and "I don't have it" are essentially the
| same: the clitic "n't" applied to a verb to negate it. In
| one case you use an auxiliary verb and in another you
| don't, but the method of negation is the same.
| jolmg wrote:
| I think the point is that they can't simply say "no".
| Also, perhaps "I haven't it" is syntactically more
| similar than "I don't have it" to what they actually say.
| messe wrote:
| > perhaps "I haven't it" is syntactically more similar
| than "I don't have it" to what they actually say
|
| Neither is particularly close, as Irish doesn't have a
| verb for have, and uses Verb-Subject-Object rather than
| Subject-Verb-Object as english does: -
| I haven't it - I have-NEG it - I
| don't have it - I NEG.AUX have it
| - Nil se agam - is-NEG it.NOM at-me
|
| (Saying that "se" is nominative isn't quite accurate,
| it's a little bit more subtle than that, but it's close
| enough).
| naniwaduni wrote:
| So something like "It isn't here", with the qualification
| that "here" doesn't quite express the contrasts
| available?
| messe wrote:
| More like, "It's not with me", at least in Hiberno
| English. We'd also say "on me" (in Hiberno-English) for
| possession, although it means that you have it on your
| immediate person:
|
| "Do you have it?"
|
| "Not on me / I don't have it on me" = it's not on my
| person.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I aint is an old but still used negation of to have. So:
| "Got your ticket"? "I aint"! However this is heading into
| regional variance territory. Granny Weatherwax (Discworld
| witch) famously wore a sign saying: "I aten't dead" when
| off Borrowing.
| samastur wrote:
| I thought BBC Alba was there to broadcast in Gaelic.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That doesn't mean that any of the rest of the organisation is
| any more than dimly aware that either BBC Alba or Gaelic
| exists.
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| I think Ta/Nil 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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/Ta", or "I am not/Nil".
| I could be wrong, so if somebody can remember the wording on
| the ballot paper, please don't hesitate to correct me.
| eloisius wrote:
| Mandarin also does not have direct equivalents of 'yes' and
| 'no'. There is a negator word Bu bu, but just answering [Bu ]
| wouldn't make sense. You answer a question with the verb that
| was asked. 'Do you like coffee?' 'Like!' or 'Bu like'. It
| doesn't feel any different or make me experience any sort of
| mental contortion to use this pattern to convey the exact same
| information I'd convey in English.
|
| I used to really like these pop linguistics kind of articles
| about exotic languages without tenses or plurals or what have
| you. It made my imagination churn to think about how it might
| influence your conception of the world if you expressed time in
| terms of length, size, or quantity. I remember a RadioLab show
| about the ancient Greeks having no word for blue, and that as a
| result they couldn't perceive it.
|
| I've since learned that this all stems from a theory called
| linguistic relativism, that the language we use constructs our
| worldview. I'm much less excited in this kind of idea since
| learning mandarin. I express the exact same thoughts and ideas
| I have in English, even if I express them without syntactical
| tenses, plurals, or whatever. Feels the same.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > I express the exact same thoughts and ideas I have in
| English, even if I express them without syntactical tenses,
| plurals, or whatever. Feels the same.
|
| It feels the same now. But you're not (and can't) compare
| what it was like to think that way before learning mandarin
| and after. Even your memories are modified by your present
| linguistic understanding.
|
| Language doesn't strongly determine how you think and feel.
| It's more complex than that. But many studies have shown the
| benefits of bilingualism, and the limited-in-scope effects
| that language can have on your thinking. Linguistic
| relativism is a real thing.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Mandarin also does not have direct equivalents of 'yes' and
| 'no'.
|
| This is going a little too far; Shi De is a direct
| equivalent of "yes".
| eloisius wrote:
| It's the equivalent to 'yes' in a subset of contexts where
| 'yes' would make sense, for example 'Is he the guy you were
| talking about?' [Shi De ] would make sense to say yes. But
| it wouldn't work as an answer like 'yes, I like hiking'.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/1947367332200522468.htm
| l
|
| Where you can say Shi De ,Wo Zui Xi Huan Pa Shan , you
| can obviously also just say Shi De .
| yibg wrote:
| The full answer is ok, but just Shi De sounds weird even
| though people would understand your intent.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I suppose Dui would be able to cover the rest of the
| contexts.
| yibg wrote:
| That's still not complete. You wouldn't answer Dui to
| the question "do you like hiking?". The standard answer
| would be "like". Or the versatile Ng
| Apocryphon wrote:
| - Ni Xi Huan Pa Shan Ma ?
|
| - Dui ,Wo Xi Huan
|
| Sounds fine to me.
|
| Though I suppose that's more like saying "That's
| correct/right, I like hiking."
| yibg wrote:
| Yea exactly. In that phrasing you're putting an
| affirmation to the original question. Just "Dui " doesn't
| work.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Just "Dui " doesn't work.
|
| As with Shi De , that isn't true.
|
| I knew one Chinese person who was very definite that Ta
| could not be used to refer to an inanimate object such as
| a folder or notebook. Instead, the object must be
| referred to with Zhe Ge .
|
| But I know other Chinese people who routinely refer to
| inanimate objects with Ta .
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I still think you can reply that way in conversation,
| because "That's correct" is a valid way to answer that
| question, imo. But sure, I guess Dui doesn't actually
| mean "yes" in the same way the word "yes" does.
| [deleted]
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| It is different. "Shi De " means "That's correct"; So if
| someone ask me "you don't smoke?" and I answer "Shi De "
| that means I don't smoke, which is actually what "no" means
| in standard English.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > So if someone ask me "you don't smoke?" and I answer
| "Shi De " that means I don't smoke, which is actually
| what "no" means in standard English.
|
| I don't think there's much to be learned by trying to
| examine this situation in English. Affirmative answers to
| negative questions are a source of frequent confusion
| among native speakers, suggesting that the rules of
| English are not clear on this point.
|
| If you said to me Ni Bu Shi You Tai Ren Ba ?, and I
| responded Shi De , what would you think?
| mazlix wrote:
| I wouldn't say that. Maybe someone would understand what
| you mean but it's definitely not as versatile as yes.
|
| I'd say the closest to yes is Ng
| Aransentin wrote:
| > You answer a question with the verb that was asked. 'Do you
| like coffee?' 'Like!' or 'Bu like'.
|
| Surely this explains that Chinese bootleg Star Wars
| translation meme where Darth Vader's "Nooo" is subtitled as
| "Do not want"?
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-want-do-not-want
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I read this response to my wife and she's in stitches.
| xobs wrote:
| That's it exactly. "Yao " means "want", and "Bu Yao " means
| "not want".
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes, because that's what a Mandarin-speaking Darth Vader
| would have said in that context. Bu Yao literally means
| "don't want" but is probably the most common negated verb
| combination used as "no." It's what a 2 year old would yell
| if you made them do something they didn't want to do. Here
| it's more an emotion expression "no, this is not what I
| wanted!"
| raffraffraff wrote:
| So does this mean that there isn't a simple, single word
| exclamation in Mandarin to denote "Nooooooo!"?
|
| How about "ffffuuuuuuuck!" etc?
| eloisius wrote:
| I didn't know this was the root of the 'do not want' meme.
| TIL. If I was to translate bootleg copy of Star Wars I
| think Darth Vader was probably trying to express 'Gan !'
|
| Jokes aside, yes that make sense, you could express your
| regret or refusal by saying Wo Bu Yao ! or you could say
| something like 'how awful!' Chinese translated literally
| sometimes feels so corny.
| AlanYx wrote:
| These days a lot of Mandarin video translations do just
| use "bu!" or "oh bu!", even though it's not grammatically
| correct and technically meaningless, just because it
| tends not to ruin the lipsyncing.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The Taiwanese dub of "We don't talk about Bruno" uses
| OhBu (actually, more like WohBu ) as a lyric sung by the
| backup chorus. (In English, the chorus is singing "no,
| no", which is a callback to the heavily focused lyric "we
| don't talk about Bruno-no-no-no". This is not true in the
| dub, where that lyric is translated as if the "no"s were
| pure repetition: the dub says "women bu ti bulunuo-nuo-
| nuo-nuo".)
|
| Lip syncing can't be a concern, because the chorus is not
| visible. The background characters on screen are not
| singing.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > linguistic relativism
|
| is a really hot button issue in linguistics, because it
| obviously correlates with certain ideological worldviews one
| way or another.
|
| If you actually look at the data... it's complicated. In my
| view, neither the hardcore relativists nor the hardcore
| universalists are right. Probably there is some symbiotic
| relationship between the concepts we express in language and
| the saliency of certain distinctions in our habitual
| cognition.
|
| IOW, it's highly unlikely that the Ancient Greeks didn't
| perceive the colour blue (much less so that this was _caused_
| by their language), but it is possible that the distinction
| between the colour blue and certain other colours was not
| seen as as significant as other distinctions (e.g.
| saturation, brightness). But all this theory ultimately stems
| from this one expression in Homer about the "wine-red sea"
| and one can only speculate.
|
| If you want a good pop-sci overview of the situation, though
| still written by a linguist, try Guy Deutscher's "Through the
| Looking Glass". That said, he does come down a bit more on
| the pro-relativism side, so you may also want to read the
| counterarguments in John McWhorther's "The Language Hoax",
| which I haven't read though.
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| The book is "Through the _Language_ Glass ", which I agree
| is very good.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Of course. It's a clear reference to Lewis Carroll,
| something which I obviously remembered better than the
| actual title of the book. Thanks for correcting.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > In my view, neither the hardcore relativists nor the
| hardcore universalists are right.
|
| I don't remember the exact phrasing, but I believe the
| relevant quote goes something like:
|
| "The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
| obviously false to anyone who's ever felt the need to coin
| a new term to describe something they didn't previously
| have words for.
|
| The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is obviously
| true to anyone who's ever felt the need to coin a new term
| to describe something they didn't previously have words
| for."
|
| (In the context of a formulation where the strong version
| is that language limitations make certain things
| _impossible_ to think or express, and the weak version is
| that language limitations just make certain things
| _difficult or inconvenient_ to think or express.)
| Swizec wrote:
| Not having the word for a color, or living in an
| environment where it doesn't feel relevant, does impact
| your ability to distinguish that color. You can still _see_
| it, of course, but it takes you measurably longer to
| perceive. Almost like a form of mild color blindness. Like
| you have to focus harder to tell colors apart if you don't
| have a word for them.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It's never been very clear to me that these kind of
| studies where you measure response time differences
| (usually measured in tens or hundreds of milliseconds)
| are really all that insightful, or say all that much
| about anything meaningful.
|
| In this case, the English speakers were actually _faster_
| than Russian speakers, and the accuracy was identical,
| only when "two colours if they fell into different
| linguistic categories in Russian" were the Russian
| speakers faster. Plus "English speakers as a group drew
| nearly the same boundary as did the Russian speakers".
|
| In this case it seems like a categorizing problem: it's
| not that English speakers can't distinguish the colours,
| it's just that the boundaries of your categories are less
| clearly defined than in Russian, so it takes a few more
| brain cycles to select the right category. I think
| everyone already agrees that some concepts can be easier
| or harder to express in certain languages (as a simple
| example, in Dutch there is no word for sibling).
|
| I don't really read any support for a "mild colour
| blindness" in that study.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Oooh I really like that for when people ask ambiguous
| questions. So is there an equivalent in mandarin for "Have
| you stopped beating your wife"?
|
| It seems like maybe you could just say "no beat" and there's
| no linguistic trap.
| eloisius wrote:
| I think I'd have trouble explaining this joke to someone.
| There is a way to say 'I've stopped': Wo Ting Zhi Liao ,
| but I think they'd probably just answer me Wo Cong Lai Mei
| You Da Guo Wo De Tai Tai 'I've never beaten my wife'.
|
| It does make the binary logic humor answer 'yes' to 'do you
| V A or B?' impossible, because there are different ways to
| express 'or' for questions or statements. I suppose puns
| and humor dependent upon word play is one area where I do
| think differently in Chinese vs English. You can crack
| jokes if you know how similar sounding words might be
| mistaken.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > "Have you stopped beating your wife"?
|
| The correct answer to this perennial bad riddle is "only
| because your mom got jealous".
| [deleted]
| messe wrote:
| I'm not sure how that's any less ambiguous than answering
| "I don't beat her".
| chris_j wrote:
| Ditto the Welsh language (also a Celtic language spoken in the
| UK), where there traditionally weren't words for yes and no and
| where the words used instead depend upon tense, person and the
| verb being responded to.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > depend upon tense, person and the verb being responded to
|
| Or the structure of the sentence.
|
| -- Dych chi'n dwp? -- Ydw. (-- Are you stupid? -- Yes.) [verb
| initial]
|
| -- Athro wyt ti? -- Ie. (-- Are you a teacher? -- Yes.) [noun
| initial]
| messe wrote:
| Interesting to know! I suspected that might be the case, but
| didn't include it as I'm not all that familiar with the
| Brittonic languages.
| w0mbat wrote:
| I 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".
| elil17 wrote:
| This language is different - it lacks the concept of negation
| all together. There's no way to negate a verb in this language.
| macleginn wrote:
| Of course there is, there are negative suffixes for that, see
| a grammatical overview here:
| https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83v8d1wv
| messe wrote:
| Yes, I pointed that out in the comment you responded to.
| youngNed wrote:
| > take note British Broadcasting Corporation
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize <-- Gaidhlig / Gaeilge / Cymraeg
| language options available
|
| _Gaidhlig_
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/alba <-- a tv channel
|
| -
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_nan_gaidhea...
| <-- a radio channel
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09xzjpm
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p09xwbsz
|
| - https://speakgaelic.scot/
|
| _Gaeilge_
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p084p79m <-- not a
| dedicated channel like Gaidhlig but regular TV programming
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zqtw7ty
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007cpvp
|
| - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cmsk6
|
| I mean, thats just a very quick look, yes Gaidhlig is better
| served than Gaeilge but my feeling is that those looking for
| Gaeilge resources are probably looking elsewhere ;-)
| nailer wrote:
| The point was that the BBC writer of this article should
| already be aware of Gaelic languages.
| youngNed wrote:
| > The point was that the BBC writer of this article should
| already be aware of Gaelic languages.
|
| Ah yes, i see that now, TY for pointing that out (i would
| imagine that the writer is not a 'BBC writer' but a
| freelancer, but yes, i see the point
| pictureofabear wrote:
| This is not that unusual. Nepali also doesn't have a clean-cut
| yes/no translation.
| becquerel wrote:
| There are a lot of languages which don't have words which map
| neatly onto the English 'yes' and 'no'.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Yes, such as Chinese.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| But there's also no word for negation which is how Chinese
| gets around not having no
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Sure, Chineses has a word for negation. In cantonese, it's
| "mh", and can be attached to nearly every verb.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| No, Cantonese is a prime example of "mh" being only a
| prefix, not a word by itself. It doesn't even have a
| vowel. There is no way that you answer a question with
| just "mh". In Mandarin Chinese the corresponding prefix
| is "bu", so you can sometimes hear broken Chinese from
| English speakers answering a question with just "bu".
| SeanLuke wrote:
| ??? I'm not saying you can use it on its own as "no" --
| indeed that was the whole point of this discussion. But
| gramatically mh is absolutely a word. Similarly you can't
| just say "not" on its own except if you're a cast member
| of Wayne's World. "Not!" But "not" is certainly a word.
| Also: since when did the presence of a vowel dicate
| wordness? Next you'll tell me that "ng" (five) isn't a
| word.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Because there is no spacing in Chinese so there can be
| some ambiguity about word boundary. The more important
| thing is that you and I both agree that "mh" cannot be
| used by itself.
|
| In Chinese numbers are also prefixed to measure words or
| classifier. eg; "How many brothers do you have?" No one
| will answer "m" but "m'go". So, I don't believe in
| colloquial Chinese that a pure number is a word. You are
| welcome to disagree.
|
| By the way, it is "m" for 5 in Cantonese. Unless you were
| talking about Shanghainese, but then is "n". "ng" is a
| common starting consonant in Cantonese, like "ngao" (cow)
| or "ngo" (I). but it doesn't have a standard meaning.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Sure 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 wrote:
| Oh okay, I think I get it now.
|
| (It's weird to think about grammar sometimes in a
| language you just grow up with.)
| samatman wrote:
| Bu is one of maybe thirty words in Chinese I know.
|
| You've never been asked "yao bu yao"?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what I meant
|
| I was saying Chinese has no word for "no" but does have a
| negation word "bu" instead, so it's not the same as the
| language featured in the article which has no negation
| word at all
| samatman wrote:
| Yes, on a more careful reading I am able to infer the
| subject of the sentence, which you elided.
|
| Note that both comments replying to you misunderstood in
| the same way.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Yeah I think the English phrasing that would make more
| sense (at least to me) would be
|
| > But there's also a word for negation which is how
| Chinese gets around not having no
| a9h74j wrote:
| If you can negate a verb regarding action, what about a
| presumed statement of fact. Are there still equivalents of
| 'true' and 'false'?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| That's how a lot of older Latin does it. For example if the
| question is "Did you go to the forum today?", the questionee
| might respond "I did not go to the forum today" (or something
| more concise like "I didn't go", or if they were being super
| informal just say the equivalent of "didn't")
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the verbs "to be" and "to have" are used to make affirmative
| statements so you would just negate those, which is also
| valid English.
|
| e.g. "Is he coming to the meeting?", instead of "Yes/No", you
| would basically say "They are/They are not" (Chinese also
| doesn't really distinguish "him/her" for third person
| pronouns)
| [deleted]
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| So.. newspeak?
| qsort wrote:
| Most 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| messe wrote:
| French 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!
| samatman wrote:
| I'm curious if you or someone else can answer this: is this
| use similar or identical to the German "doch"?
|
| I've always like "doch", which was explained to me as meaning
| "I agree with you", and spares the speaker the effort of
| matching the negatives or not in the question.
|
| "Are you going to the club then?" "yes" "doch" "Are you not
| going to the club then?" "no" "doch"
| Taywee wrote:
| That's not how "doch" works. It's the German "though" and
| works to mean effectively "on the contrary" in response to
| a negative question. It doesn't work in response to a
| positive question.
|
| "Du magst mich nicht?" You don't like me? "Doch" Yes I do.
| samatman wrote:
| Ah, that's too bad, although it fits the 'spirit of
| German' (Deutchgeist?) better than what I misunderstood
| it to mean.
|
| So yes, the same as the French <<Si>> as others have
| explained it.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > (Deutchgeist?)
|
| Correct spelling would be "Deutschgeist", but it's not a
| word that evokes much sense. I think a good translation
| would be "im Geiste der deutschen Sprache", which more
| literally translates to "in the spirit of the German
| language". Yeah, sadly we can't use combined nouns for
| everything...
| qsort wrote:
| It's more about resolving the ambiguity of a negative
| question. Taking GP's example: You don't
| like me, do you?
|
| If you just answer "yes", it's unclear if you mean "logical
| yes" = "It's true, I don't like you" or "semantical yes" =
| "Why would you say that, I do like you".
|
| French resolves that ambiguity with "si" to mean the
| latter. In languages like English that don't have the same
| concept, you would repeat a bit of the question to clarify.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| I would generally expect to interpret a "yes" as the
| former? The "why would you say that, I do like you" seems
| more like a "no", though troublingly an unqualified "no"
| probably _also_ implies "No, I don't [like you]." Maybe
| if spoken with a tone of offense an indignation...
| Wildgoose wrote:
| English used to have this distinction using the words
| "yeah" and "yes" but the distinction in usage has
| disappeared.
| simiones wrote:
| No, "si" is only used as a positive response to a negative
| question.
|
| A: Tu ne vas pas au club, n'est-ce pas? //You're not going
| to the club, right?
|
| B: Si! //Yes! ; this means B is going to the club
|
| B: Oui! //Yes! ; this means B is agreeing with A, indeed B
| is _not_ going to the club; in practice this is probably
| somewhat ambiguous
|
| B: Non! //No! ; probably this also means that B is not
| going to the club, though it could also mean that B is
| contradicting A: B _is_ going to the club.
|
| In contrast, if A had asked "Tu vas au club?" (Are you
| going to the club?), B wouldn't normally answer "Si", since
| "Si" only makes sense as a response for a negative
| question.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > No, "si" is only used as a positive response to a
| negative question.
|
| Yes it is/doch/si! :) Because OP misunderstood, "doch" is
| used exactly the same way as the french "si" and as you
| described.
| remram wrote:
| This has interesting consequences on my speaking English.
| Do you not like me?
|
| In French this question including a negative would invite two
| responses, either "no" (negative agreement, I don't like you)
| or "si" (positive disagreement, I do like you). No French
| person would reply "yes" to such a question (that would be
| ambiguous) or be confused by the "no" or "si" answers.
|
| Of course there is no "si" in English and I know that, but
| because I grew up speaking French, I intuitively understand
| "no" to mean agreement, which is not usually what a native
| English speaker means. I will also tend to reply "no" to mean
| agreement, though I will not reply "yes": I will notice that
| I can't say "si", but forget that the absence of "si" also
| means I can't say "no".
| Wildgoose wrote:
| English used to have this distinction, we used to use "yes"
| as a strong affirmative, and "yeah" otherwise. We still use
| both words but the distinction between them has
| disappeared.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| It is amazing that no one yet has posted about the Japanese
| language. Yes, "technically" there is a term for "no" (iie). In
| practice, outside of official documentation, almost no one uses
| it in daily life. (When you fill official docs, hai==yes, and
| iie==no.) There are so many stupid Japanese language training
| books that teach you about "iie", but you will never hear it in
| the Real World, except during language trailing dialogs! Most
| Japanese people will say "Wei imasu" (chiigamasu / "it is
| different") to avoid saying "no" directly.
| bdowling wrote:
| YouTuber That Japanese Man Yuta recently posted a good video
| explanation/exploration of this.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9JdP6pA5LY
| Tainnor wrote:
| The casual equivalent of iie, to my knowledge, is uun.
| yadaeno wrote:
| In verbal communication, you use the negative form of the verb
| in question instead.
|
| In computer dialogues you see iie, also if im not mistaken
| people say iie when they are flattered.
| hackernewds wrote:
| What are the Japanese words in your comment?
| acid_burn wrote:
| hai = "hai" = yes iie = "iie" = no
| mazlix wrote:
| Why do you say that? What's your experience? I've spent years
| in Japan and live with 2 native Japanese and hear hai and iie
| all the time...
|
| When you give a Japanese person a compliment the most comment
| response IME is iie (nooo I'm not)
|
| And hai is said all the time
| macleginn wrote:
| As 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 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
| CSSer wrote:
| The Hungarian and Finnish location and direction suffixes thing
| sounds a lot like latin case. Do you know off-hand if it's
| related?
| macleginn wrote:
| "Relatedness" is a very thorny notion here because we cannot
| discount the possibility of long-range contact influence in
| Western Eurasia. Many ancient Indo-European languages had
| some kind of ablative or locative case, and accusative was
| often used in a directional sense.
|
| However, localtive-case systems of Hungarian and Finnish are
| much more developed than anything we see in Indo-European
| (Latin has at most 3 cases with locative/directional
| semantics; Hungarian has 9; Finnish has 8), so it's a
| different system anyway.
| beeforpork wrote:
| It's not related. But suffixing is a very common way of
| expressing stuff also in unrelated languages, e.g., your
| Finnish locative works just like it does in Japanese or Tamil
| (structurally, not literally: it is a different ending) --
| and those three are totally unrelated.
|
| Structurally, Finnish endings are also quite different from
| Latin as the ending is always the same (almost, except for
| vowel changes), while Latin has an array of endings for the
| same function and you need to learn about declension classes
| of nouns to understand how to select the right one. Finnish
| 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin.
| E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssa' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in
| America', 'Sveitsissa' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the
| ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or
| '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssa' is 'in (location)':
| 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissa' 'in Switzerland'.
| In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it
| is '-il'.
|
| This seems to confuse inflectional suffixes with analytic
| particles. Certainly -ne and -que in Latin are not
| suffixes; they are clitics, exactly analogous to the
| English articles _a(n)_ and _the_ (not usually considered
| "prefixes"). They are not part of the word after which they
| appear. In contrast, the -i in _humi_ "on the ground" is a
| part of the word, which mutated into that form to express a
| locative use.
|
| (As a side note, that is not at all the norm in Latin -
| location is usually expressed with a preposition, as in
| _sub monte_ "under [at the foot of] the mountain". _Humus_
| is one of only a handful of words that preserve the
| locative case.)
|
| I believe the situation for Japanese _de_ is similar, with
| _de_ being either a clitic or a fully independent word. I
| have no knowledge of Tamil or Finnish.
| macleginn wrote:
| In Japanese, as in many other head-final languages, it is
| often hard to impossible to distinguish between clitics
| and suffixes. -de can only attach to a noun because a
| noun phrase always ends with a noun and there can be
| nothing between a noun and a -de, they are inseparable.
| On the other hand, there is no phonological fusion of any
| kind between a noun and -de (unlike in verbs, where yom-u
| 'to read' becomes yon-de in the gerund form). Because of
| this -de and other case markers are described both as
| "particles" and "case endings" in different sources.
|
| In agglutinative languages with freer word order, it is
| easier to argue that a locative morpheme is a suffix
| because it always appears with nouns, but absent any
| phonological processes that bind them together, one can
| always write them with a space and call the second part
| "locative postposition". In some cases, it is even
| unclear if an agglutinative language is very
| morphologically complex or just uses a lot of function
| words.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| 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 wrote:
| I'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&sor.
| ..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Tainnor wrote:
| I get your point, but the reasoning for my "putdown" can be
| found in GGP's comment, so I feel like you're getting hung
| up on a minor issue here. I was merely corroborating the
| first sentence of GGP's comment.
|
| Certainly, if the bar for comments here is "it has to make
| the reader substantially more knowledgeable", not a lot of
| comments would remain. Even in this very comment section, I
| can find other "empty putdowns" or not very substantiated
| comments.
| vt85 wrote:
| tuukkah wrote:
| In Finnish, "not" is an auxiliary verb, so "do" + "not" and
| similar combinations are just one word:
|
| "I do not" => "En"
|
| "(It) does not" => "Ei"
|
| etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_verb#Finnish
| horsawlarway wrote:
| That's interesting - since basically every auxiliary verb I
| can think of for english
|
| (Am, is, are, was, were, will, have, has, had, may, might,
| can, could, shall, should, must, ought to, would)
|
| has a contraction form with "not" (although some are fairly
| colloquial, or considered out of date):
|
| (amn't, isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't, willn't, haven't,
| hasn't, hadn't, mayn't, can't, couldn't, shalln't, shouldn't,
| mustn't, oughtn't to, wouldn't)
| ruined wrote:
| the contraction for "am not" is "ain't", not "amn't", which
| isn't a word
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > amn't
|
| Amn't is neither standard nor historically supported; the
| word naturally developed into the modern word _ain 't_,
| which is stigmatized.
|
| Standard English essentially requires "I'm not" instead.
| Where avoiding the inflectional form is impossible, the
| standard awkwardly provides first-person _aren 't_.
|
| > willn't
|
| Not sure what you were thinking here; there is a negative
| form of _will_ , but it's _won 't_.
|
| > shalln't
|
| And this is _shan 't_.
| blix wrote:
| There ain't no such thing as 'Standard English.'
| spullara wrote:
| My daughter invented amn't when she was 3 based on the
| rules that she understood.
| [deleted]
| andsoitis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The 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...
| math-dev wrote:
| Lisp (nothing is impossible)
| owens99 wrote:
| Chinese doesn't either (technically).
|
| Hao = OK,
|
| Shi = Is,
|
| Both are used to mean yes
|
| Bu Yao = Don't want,
|
| Bu Yong = Don't need,
|
| Both are used to mean no
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Skepticism 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_f...
|
| * Guugu Yimithirr supposedly only has absolute directions (north,
| west, etc, instead of left, right)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language
| Tainnor wrote:
| Nobody 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 wrote:
| The 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/10.1080/03740463.2017.1...
| bradrn wrote:
| This 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
|
| [1] Francois 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-...
| [deleted]
| archibaldJ wrote:
| > 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
| xchip wrote:
| As long as it uses NAND they are fine
| linkdink wrote:
| 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.
| brutusborn wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| In the video he says that "yes/no" are for negative questions
| and "yea/nay" are for positive questions.
| linkdink wrote:
| This is why people who are interested should just watch the
| video. It's only about 4 minutes of actual content.
| ogogmad wrote:
| yeah should be yea, traditionally pronounced "yay"
| linkdink wrote:
| Yea autocorrect
| ericsoderstrom wrote:
| English 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 wrote:
| "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?"
| sgt101 wrote:
| Definitely not prolog that would be a complete failure!
|
| see what I did there?
| realPubkey wrote:
| This must be yaml
| [deleted]
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Yes, it's the same in Mandarin.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Similar 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 wrote:
| In Cantonese you can't just say "mh" (the equivalent of
| "bu"). It's a negator like "not". You have to say "mh
| [verb]".
| kazinator wrote:
| "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."
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(page generated 2022-08-12 23:01 UTC)