Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Words for “yes” in Romance languages

benito-cereno.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 172 posts

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#61

Post by EB-Barrington »

davidgay wrote: post #32

My favourite on the yes/no front though is the border between Greece and Bulgaria where "Ne" (Не) means no in Bulgarian and, IIUC, yes in Greek. And then the Bulgarians also have approximately reversed vs Western Europe head movements for yes and no, to maximise confusion :)

Albanians (like Bulgaria, Albania shares a border with Greece) also nod up and down for no, and turn their heads left-to-right for yes. As in Bulgaria, this is not universal throughout the populace - making it all the more confusing when you come across it during conversation.

Related: in Albanian, yes is "po", no is "jo".

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#62

Post by glandium »

labster wrote: post #59
davidgay wrote: post #32

My favourite on the yes/no front though is the border between Greece and Bulgaria where "Ne" (Не) means no in Bulgarian and, IIUC, yes in Greek. And then the Bulgarians also have approximately reversed vs Western Europe head movements for yes and no, to maximise confusion :)

Japanese has the native いえ 'ie' for no, but they also occasionally use the English loanword イエス iesu for yes. I haven't spent much time with Japanese native speakers, but that must have confused someone.

no is いいえ (iie) in japanese, so the i is longer than in yes.

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#63

Post by jodrellblank »

midhir wrote: post #40

"So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tó to mean yes" Really? In modern Irish we substitute Tá for yes but it's not really yes. We don't have yes or no, we repeat the verb of the question positively or negatively. Tá is kind of 'am', níl 'am not' like "Are you going to watch Mrs Browns Boys tonight?" "I am not." Are they really comparable? Maybe somewhere along the line Tá (pronounced 'taw') was…

"Are you hungry?" "I am and I amn't".

"Will you run away with yourself" "I willn't!"

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#65

Post by frooxie »

interfixus wrote: post #58

So, ' si ' does survive in French after all. I never would have guessed. Perhaps somewhat interestingly, the Scandinavian languages (Danish/Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, etc.) make a similar distinction between plain 'yes' (' ja ') and the affirmation of a negation (' jo ). English seems to have largely discarded that subtlety, despite the presumed influence of vikings from the north as well as those from across the…

English used to have a four-form system, where yes and no were the responses to a question posed in the negative, whereas yea and nay were the responses to positively framed questions.

I know German has "ja" and "doch" as ways of saying "yes" to positively vs negatively framed questions.

One thing I've found interesting is that in English you answer positively and negatively framed question in the same way, whereas in many East-Asian languages, you take the internal logic of the sentence into account, leading to confusing dialogues for English teachers working abroad in Asia: "Didn't you do your homework?" "Yes. Yes, I didn't do my homework".

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#66

Post by taneliv »

acobster wrote: post #22
make3 wrote: post #4

I really like profanity laced erudite articles, for some reason. Maybe it scratches a similar hitch that Rick does in Rick and Morty. Which makes me think, man I'd love to read a scientific paper written by Rick! :)

This. ;) I think what tickles me about it is that they clearly know what they're talking about, but they're also actively setting themselves apart from the Ivory Tower and signaling that their interest is one that brings them some earnest fucking joy.

It is probably only appreciable because it contrasts starkly with the expectations. But if people were to regularly write academic treatises peppered with obscenities, I think it would get rather old rather fast.

Which is not to say that one could not use more, ummm... vernacular language. But in quite moderation, I would say.

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#67

Post by frooxie »

unscaled wrote: post #20
twiss wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's a superb article, it strikes me as being distinctly aimed at laypeople, and I suspect someone who studied linguistics might already know large parts of it. (I haven't, but I know parts from having had Latin in school.) (Also, it contains the words "This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already." so I suspect there mig…

This should be pretty common knowledge to any linguist who studied historical linguistics, although if you never did any historical linguistics you could easy miss that. This should also be common knowledge to anyone who studied late-medieval Latin texts, as many of them use this feature to distinguish the 3 major Romance vernaculars of Europe, e.g. Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia. There is even an entire region called…

Do you have any books to recommend for people who aren't interested in learning in-depth about historical linguistics, but like reading about the sort of interesting trivia found in the Tumblr post?

Re: Words for “yes” in Romance languages

#69

Post by mjfisher »

Slavic wrote: post #64

Stopped reading at "some slavic shit"

I've become increasingly interested in how people become offended recently. Offence tends to be bound up in notions of identity, and I think the way people offend and become offended is increasingly a factor in a world becoming more polarised. Would you be able to expand a little on your feelings? Would you expect people from other cultures mentioned in the article to be similarly offended? I'm not asking you to justify or defend your position - I'm genuinely curious about the feelings you have.
Post reply on HN