Words for “yes” in Romance languages | Hacker News Reader

Words for “yes” in Romance languages

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Loved that pun from Baudolino by Umberto Eco: "I know, Master Niketas, that the center of the universe is your city here, but the world is vaster than your empire, and there's even Ultima Thule and the land of Hibernians. True, compared to Constantinople, Rome is a pile of ruins and Paris is a muddy village, but even there something happens every now and then. In many vast, vast regions of the world people don't speak Greek, and there are those who, when they want to agree with something, say, oc." "Oc?" "Oc." "Strange. But do go on."

> Paris is a muddy village

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutetia#Etymology

Would the old Celtic root luto-/luteuo- (marsh, swamp) mentioned there be related to Latin lutum (mud, loam, sand, dust)?

In Spanish lodo is mud, it looks more similar to the Celtic word to me. Interesting.

Well, in tandem with Spanish, we also say it like that in Portuguese. But I always take it to mean sludge, not just any mud. For plain mud, we use the more common word lama.

I personally find the use of single word "This." in reply to a comment on forums (such as e.g. HN) really annoying. (But then again, I've reached an age where you tend to find everything new awful.) I guess the reason why it pisses me off is that it doesn't do anything that "Yes.", "Exactly.", "I agree" couldn't already do, but at the same time it has this overly sweet smell of kool-aid that just makes you sick.

this.

times a 1,000.

[image of a text]

sorry gotta go. my raw water delivery just arrived [emoji].

I can't tell which earlier message you're thissing.

Like the GGP I sort of hate "This.", but I think I love "thissing".

Indeed, it seems very hard to dis the thissing.

For me (I’m 46 so I think I’ve reached “get off my lawn” age), it’s short for “this [is the correct answer.]” So I’ve never had a problem with it and probably used it once or twice myself.

A couple summers ago at the pool I heard a teenage girl exclaim “poned!” after besting her friend at something they were playing. It took me a moment to realize she’d just said “pwned” since I’d never heard it said out loud before and in my mind I’ve always read it “owned.” Now that was a “get off my lawn moment!”

> A couple summers ago at the pool I heard a teenage girl exclaim “poned!” after besting her friend at something they were playing. It took me a moment to realize she’d just said “pwned” since I’d never heard it said out loud before and in my mind I’ve always read it “owned.” Now that was a “get off my lawn moment!”

That pronunciation was popularized by the famous South Park episode on World of Warcraft [1] [2] which first aired in 2006. So it's not actually particularly new at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPx__G9GkRY [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft

I'd go with the all time great Canadian Gamer show: PurePwnage, from 2004, as the popularizer of the spoken term. Though it goes back to at least 1999 with the original CounterStrike and the term in text, then read aloud. I remember the shouts of 'pone' in the afterschool computer lounge from friends to at least 1999, if not earlier.

http://www.purepwnage.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Pwnage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn

I don't dispute the pronunciation as 'poned' goes back further, but I'm saying that South Park popularized it. PurePwnage uses the pronunciation 'owned', right?

"...you pronounce 'own' as 'pwn', what gives?"

It was definitely popular in fps games in 99’

It's more like "this... is the correct answer, and it so obviously resonates extensively with everyone else that I feel no need to substantiate any further, other than with an abrupt and final full stop".

To me it sometimes comes across as "you made your comment, I agree, and I'll take the liberty to suggest that it's so obvious and insightful that probably everyone must agree".

This.

To me the word you quoted is much stronger than "exactly" or "I agree." The latter two are about the sentiment but the former means something like "This is the best possible phrasing I can imagine: I completely agree and you have captured everything, perfectly." While for a deep discourse (as on HN) --

Oh.

Okay so nevermind. When I started to write this comment I was going to say that here on hacker news it fosters a deeper discourse, but as a poor reader on Reddit reading through 700 comments, do you really want to read the long sentence I just quoted, or are you helped by reading "this", to call your attention upthread.

However I realized that Reddit's 700 comments on each thread are - almost all noise. "This" is a kneejerk one word answer that completely shuts down discourse.

So after actually writing my comment I have switched my opinion. Which itself may well have been due to the style of discourse encouraged here!

For me the worst offender is

/thread

Indeed

This

Yes

/sarc

"non-trivial" is the one that annoys me the most but I can't fully explain why. Perhaps it's a bit like the reaction when I hear "visceral" while listening to book and movie reviews. It just seems a tad pretentious; or stuck-up. Urgh.

I understand it's all about precision but to me it doesn't feel like the type of plain English that normal people use. Perhaps it's too... formulaic?

To me, "This." is stronger than "Yes.", "Exactly.", etc.

In my opinion, "This." means that you not only agree with the previous comments, but you could have made it yourself. It has a connotation of "This is the full answer", "This is it, you don't even need to read further below", "This is exactly the same thing I would have said".

I might be making the connotations up, though, it's not like there is a dictionary covering this kind of things.

Exactly.

"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 taken for 'yes'.

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

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

I was wondering about this. Thanks for chiming in. I don't know Irish but I do know a bit of Scottish Gaelic, and it is as you say: there is no word for yes (or no), not even in the way the author suggests. Affirmation or negation is done by repeating the verb of the question. In the case of simple "to be" questions, that verb is either tha or 's. But a question like "have you read the book?", which would be structured "read you the book?", would be answered either "read" for the affirmative or "(not) read" for the negative.

In any event, tha—which I presume is the Scottish equivalent to Irish tá—doesn't mean yes either.

In Welsh you use "do" to assent to things asserted about the past. "Wyt ti wedi bwyta?" [Have you eaten?] "Do." [Yes.] The negative is "naddo". If you ask a question with something other than the verb initial, the affirmative is "ie" and the negative "nage". Otherwise, it works like you say in Irish or as in an English wedding ceremony. "Do you take so-and-so to be your lawfully wedded spouse?" "I do."

The 'tó' and 'náthó' mentioned in the article are actually borrowings from Middle Welsh into Middle Irish, but they fell out of fashion again. Old Irish didn't have yes/no equivalents.

'Tá' (present tense independent form of the verb 'bí') and 'tó' aren't thought to be related.

That's not quite right. 'Tá' only means 'yes' when answering a question in the present tense that uses the verb 'bí', e.g., 'An bhfuil tú anseo? Tá.' ('Are you there? (I) am' - 'bhfuil' is from the dependent form of the verb 'bí').

OIr 'tó' and 'tá' aren't (directly at least) related. From what I can dig up from eDIL, 'tó' and 'náthó' are borrowings of the Welsh 'do' and 'nado' that later fell out of use again.

Echoing back the verb is a common way to reply affirmatively in Portuguese and (traditional) Galician. I hear that was common in Latin too. For some old Galician people, replying "yes" to a question is comprehensible but a mark of rudeness.

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 :)

> And then the Bulgarians also have approximately reversed vs Western Europe head movements for yes and no, to maximise confusion :)

This is strangely the most shocking fact that I know. It's one of those facts that remind you that just because something is universal doesn't mean that it's not cultural.

Shaking one's head for "no" is far from universal - it means "yes" in parts of India as well.

India also has its own head motion that, for lack of better way of explaining it, is in aircraft terms a roll as compared to our pitch for yes and yaw for no. (Or maybe that's what you're talking about?). It doesn't mean "yes" exactly from what I've been able to gather, but more like "uh-huh" might be used as marker of paying attention in a running conversation. Like "I hear you, please continue" without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing.

That's probably a better description. At first blush it looks like something you might interpret as skepticism - rocking the head side to side as if to say "That's not quite right." It took me a while to figure out it indicates a positive response to a question like "Does this bus go downtown?" rather than a negative one.

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.

I was confused for a long time by the "un" (yes) and "uun" (no) in my beginner's Japanese textbook. It turned out that the spelling was more or less conventional (could have been "n" and "nnn") and that it was really the intonation that made the word (falling and dipping). IIRC this simple nasal yes/no is used in several Asian countries.

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".

It's even worse that some of them compensate when you're a tourist, nodding for yes and shaking their heads for no. But you can't know whether they're doing that.

For some reason I'm thinking game theory now.

French people also nod upwards to say "no". This is just one swift nod, not an up-and-down nod, and it's usually accompanied by a quick drawn-in breath. I've never seen that anywhere else. My friends who did that were Occitan btw. so maybe it's not all of France.

But in Greece a short nod up with some lip pressure is also no, right?

At least that is what I am used to from my Greek friends.

Yep. I found the French upward nod very confusing the first few times I saw it.

In Italy, nodding upwards is a very passive aggressive and rude way of saying “no”. It’s accompanied with a quick lip smack rather than a drawn-in breath though.

I’m French (from Paris) and I’ve never seen this. I’d be confused as well if I ever saw it.

In Turkey we have raised eyebrows for a no, often denoting also some sort of pity/empathy if the lips are squeezed into a half-smile form (sometimes this is accompanied by a slow bobbing of the head).

I think I know the expression, yes :)

If you saw a Russian doing that it would most probably be a sign of hidden negative reaction to whatever you are doing.

I'm Greek and indeed "nai" means yes in Greek. But I thought "ne" means "no" in Serbian, not Bulgarian. It's probably both.

In Slovakia the word for “yes” is “ano” but people shorten it to “’no”, which makes things very confusing when you get there :)

Polish has also borrowed "ano"/"no" from Czech/Slovakian, although the normal Polish word for "yes" is "tak"

As a bulgarian, living in the US for the last 19 years, I can't say right now which head movement was yes, or no. I think I use both ways, choosing one over the other subconsciously - but can't tell how consistently, and why would I chose one vs the other... Maybe I need some deep reflection and introspection... things that any software engineer would love to have.... in their... language?

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! :)

I like the use of hip hop lingo too, like the "Slavic shit" the Romanians are "on" and the "dope" way the Gaulish moustache-boys talk.

Actually - and I don't know whether this was intentional on the writer's part - there's a parallel there, between people being attracted to how the Gauls talked (i.e. away from the very uncool "official" language of Latin), and the widespread appeal and co-option of hip hop lingo. Hip hop subculture came from a segment of society that had every reason to distrust the "official" culture, and made every effort to differentiate itself. Maybe that's how it was in the waning days of the Roman Empire too, especially in the farther outposts like Gaul.

Oc. It's not only a joy to read- it's probably more accurate in the end. You can't really capture the spirit of any of that human behavior if you try to lean on dry academic rigor.

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.

Here's a bit of a metatake on this: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/... where it's reflecting on indigenous culture while preferring to write in a prose styled after that culture

I enjoy reading this kind of stuff regardless, so adding profanity to make it “cool” strikes me as childish and lame.

It took away from the whole thing, for me. Almost like the author is not wanting to look like a nerd and, so, over-compensating.

In Greece we had a writer called Nikos Tsiforos whose schtick was exactly that. He wrote entire history and mythology books in a Greek argot (the language of the "manges" and the rebetika, which you probably won't find about on the 'net). He used the slang of a criminal subculture that was full of profanity, sarcasm and disdain for authority and polite society to treat scholarly subjects like the Francocracy, the Conquistadores and the histories of Greece, France, Britain and the United States.

That was back in the '50s or so and his books were widely panned by the literary critics of his time but they were still popular several decades later when I was growing up.

This idea isn't particularly new: even the New Testament is written in what was basically street Greek rather than the more formal variant usually employed for written documents.

The language in the New Testament is not formal, yes, but it's not "street Greek" in the same sense that we mean "street speak" today. At the time, Greek was the lingua franca of that part of the world, basically the Roman empire, so it was used by people who didn't have another common language to communicate in their daily interactions. It's not a slang though, nor a subculture's secret argot.

For instance, today the de facto lingua franca spoken around the world is English. So, if the New Testament was written today- it would be obviously written in English to reach the broadest audience possible.

Now, imagine if the apostles decided to write about Christ's life not just in English, but in the kind of English used in gangsta rap. I have read the New Testament in the original and I can assure you that is not what it sounds like :)

Sanskrit also lacked a single affirmative particle, instead using various words/phrases meaning "true" or "it is so" (sat, satya, astu)

Also similar to Latin, most of it's daughter languages standardized on a single affirmative particle "haan".

Astu (अस्तु) is imperative, asti, (अस्ति) is what would be used.

Either works depending on the context. "astu" is more like "let it be so". Still, there is no single generic affirmative particle.

I believe the direct cognate of this in Latin is "esto".

Interesting. In (Brazilian) Portuguese, "isso" and "isso aí" ("this", "this there") is used to confirm or agree with something, so it seems the expression survived the times.

Curious coincidence how that sounds like 'it's so' and 'itsso, eh'!

> "isso aí"

> 'itsso, eh'

Trivia: notice 'isso aí' has an acute accent on í which indicates the syllable is stressed. Doesn't sound much like 'eh' https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/a%C3%AD similar to 'itsso ah-E'.

Technically, “isso” translates to “that”, whereas “isto” translates to “this”. Good point, anyway.

Both translate to 'this'. Isso is a coloquial form of isto. Aquilo translate to 'that'.

That sounds similar to spanish' esto, eso, aquello so I guess their usage is similar?

Esto (isto) = this (at hand's reach)

Eso (isso) = that (close but out of reach)

Aquello (aquilo) = that (far away)

Isto and isso are both "close" but they're still different degrees of closeness. I would still translate 'eso' as 'that'.

EDIT: But I guess you speak Brazilian Portuguese:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/isto#Portuguese

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/isso#Portuguese

> isso: (demonstrative, informal, Brazil) this

Yes I speak brazilian portuguese. I think the usage is different from spanish, and probably 'isto' and 'aquilo' is the same for both in Brazil and Portugal, while 'isso' usage exists only in Brazil.

I always thought it was some kind of contraction of "isso e certo". The same expression also exist in Spanish.

Same with the "this" reply that's so in vogue online in English: "this [is the correct answer]".

It's interesting that in Catalan you may say oi [0] in addition to sí. It is more commonly used in questions and to answer such questions. For example:

Plou molt, oi? Oi.

There's a construct that is very common and redundant: oi que sí? == right that yes?, which would be translated as an emphatic "right?"

[0] http://mdlc.iec.cat/results.asp?txtEntrada=Oi&operEntrada=0

It sounds like a calque of regular Spanish 'a que si' rather than anything else.

Not oui in French?

If you read the article, this is a pattern in a number of languages, so there's no reason for it to come from French. It's also unlikely because the pronunciation is very different: https://forvo.com/word/oi/#ca

Catalonia borders France and has some similarities though.

Bordering with French is a newer phenomenon, though. Catalonia has traditionally bordered Occitan-speaking territories to the North so it has way more influence from Occitan than from French.

A calque wouldn't take such a particular word as "oi". The sentence makes sense coming from oral language, where you say oi to ask for confirmation and add the rest to specify in which direction. People do say "eh que sí", which, cal que or not, follows the same pattern, and even "a que sí", which definitely copies the Spanish expression.

"Oi que sí" in Spanish is a lot like "oy, yeah" in English. The "oi" is not "this" or "yeah", it's "oy, I already told you".

Now, "oí, que sí" is different: "hear me: yes", but maybe only in Argentina/Uruguay, where imperatives are constructed differently than elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. "Oí" deriving from "oid", which is the second person plural imperative in proper Spanish -- just drop the 'd', keep the stress on the 'i', and use it as the second person singular imperative (this is the formula for all second person singular imperatives down there).

Now this is a cool article. It's funny and ironic that an article uses slang while talking about how old languages acquired other phrases from other languages, calques.

I do wish future articles take note how adding humor to an article shows a level of care and understanding about the subject/ideas.

Agreed. So many technical blogs try to strike the same to to sound edgy or cute. Here the author uses it masterfully to reinforce his points on language.

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 channel.

Sligthly reduced use of shit and fucking would not have been seriously detrimental to my enjoyment of the article.

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".

Dutch makes this distinction as well: "ja" and "jawel".

"jawel" is a contraction of "ja" and "wel", which both mean "yes", but are used differently. "Ja" would be the opposite of "no" and "wel" the opposite of "not".

Interesting notes about Latin. I always learned that Latin didn't have a direct analogue to "yes," with the closest thing being "ita vero"[1] (not just "ita"). But "sic" makes sense in many contexts.

[1]: "thus it is so," or "it is true," or "and how!".

In Portuguese, although ‘sim’ means yes, when answering a question in the affirmative you often use the same verb as the question.

For example: “Gosta frango? Gosto.” “Do you like chicken? I like it.”

Also, it’s common to say ‘isso’ to agree with something. It means ‘this’ and Anglophones are now doing the same thing, at least online.

Pedantically, "isso" means "that". "This" is "isto".

To be fair, it’s almost uncommon to say an articulated ‘isto’ in colloquial spoken language.

My impression is that the Brazilians use "sim" a bit the same way the french use "si".

"Você vai?" "Vou" ("are you going?" "I am going") "Você não vai?" "Sim" ("Aren't you going?" "yes I am")

Does anyone else have problems reading that blog because of the font?

Yes. Use Firefox Reader View by clicking the icon in the address bar or press CTRL + ALT + R.

It's some legacy thing called cufón (http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/) that literally overlays images on top of text as a polyfill for lack of font-face support in CSS.

> So they combined hoc with ille, which means “that” (but also comes to just mean “he”: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on)

Well, I have to disagree on this bit. French for "he" is actually "il"; while "le" is "the".

If you are more interested, "that" would be "ce", or if you want to stress it/be more accurate, "cela" (can be contracted to "ça"), or "celui-là" -- literally "that him there" -- while "this" would be "ceci". Yeah, lots of words to mean the same, you would usually be fine just picking one.

Interesting read nonetheless.

To be more specific, "le" is masculine "the", but can also mean him, "Je le vois" => "I see him".

Good point, I hadn't thought of this.

But do other languages also have "jein" (blend of German ja and nein)? "meh", perhaps.

Swedish has "nja" (blend of Swedish ja and nej).

Portuguese has nim, a merge of não and sim.

Italian has "ni", a merge of "no" and "sì".

In American Sign Language, the signs glossed as THAT and as YES also resemble each other.

The sign YES is http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/y/yes.htm which looks like a head nod, but also it is the general motion your hand takes when you spell Y-E-S in the manual alphabet. (Lots of ASL signs are lexicalized fingerspellings. They started off as just being fingerspelled, but over time they became words themselves)

The sign THAT can be used to agree with someone emphatically (and also as backchanneling, as in THAT THAT THAT, is like "yeah, uh huh, oh, ok, mm") For an example see the second image on http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/t/that.htm

Notice that THAT is made with the Y handshape, same as the initial letter in Y-E-S, and moves like YES. Hmm!

I always wondered why the French "oui" was so different from most other romance languages. Great explanation, and a fun read.

I wonder, is occitan not related to occident and orient? and oil, well, that's norse for beer, remember where normandy has it's name from? That doesn't explain yes, no; but eu, as in euphemism might[1]. Heureka! In other news, what does si in greek letters look like? "σι"! Pretty close to oi nowadays and Celtic druids are speculated to have visited Greece. That doesn't invalidate the "this there" story, but maybe precedes it.

The disdain for Slavik in the article is confirming a slight bias.

[1]: also europe, eukaryote, oi-punk, Euler. Well, almost. "arobe" means harbor (ger. Heimathaven?) in some European language but I CBA to look up which it was or how it's written, right now.

> I wonder, is occitan not related to occident and orient?

Nope!

The orient is where the sun rises and the occident is where the sun sets.

All of these have been traced back to Proto-Indo-European and have different origins:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orior#Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/occido#Etymology_1

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ob#Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hic#Latin

Edit: the eu- also has a different PIE etymology.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B5%E1%BD%96#Ancient_Greek

Yeah, I can google myself thank you very much.

Your inability to speak or to read properly makes me really doubt your general premises, because neither had anyone talked about ob and you didn't explain the relation to the thread either, nor did you notice my precaution to note that I the theory for oil from the article might still be valid. Instead you seem to have come panting and frothing from the mouth as soon as you had read the first few lines hardly being able to read the rest of my post. I know how it is, I do that too sometimes. No harm done.

> the eu- also has a different PIE etymology.

I know, why do you think I would have mentioned it otherwise?! If you had to guess in percent how certain a single PIE root is, and then take the combined probability for ll f the roots of the rather young PIE studies, which are very well known to have produced a metric shittonne of false results not even a hundred years ago that we are still wading through, how likely is it that the patient has cancer?

To repeat, what's "ob" have to do with this?

> To repeat, what's "ob" have to do with this?

Ob is the prefix that combined with cado to produce occido, which is the origin of occident. The assimilation of the b to the initial consonant of the other verb is something that's been seen in a large number of other cases.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Latin_words_prefixed...

See, when you said

> All of these have been traced back to Proto-Indo-European and have different origins:

that could be taken to mean that the PIE terms have different roots or no roots at all.

"ob" and "eu" go back to * h₁epi- and * h₁es- ... and evidently obs-, obc- is frequent so there's the assumption that * h₁epis > * h₁epi- must (might) have been a thing; while you already noted that loss of b before a consonant is a thing, so that * h₁ebs- > * h₁es- were not too unlikely either. Even closer now, I'll stop there.

But to think that terms as basic and simple as "yes" would be innovations instead of variations of varieties that existed for millennia, warrants a lot of doubt. Just pointing at a few made up roots doesn't impress anyone, really.

Historical linguistics is clinging to the "single mother" hypothesis. It's a useful abstraction, but as programmers we should know better. Simply speaking, it appears to me that the sheer amount of material to work with is too intimidating to researchers (manually) to even attempt to favor the assumption of chaos. So if it can't be supported by historic artifacts it's labeled mere coincidence. And reliable artifacts are sparse. So everything is uncertain. OK, I don't actually know much about the archeology, but as far as I know, Celtic and Germanic is generally not well preserved as text. I agree, I guess, the threshold to validate a claim is rather high. And I do err at times, quite trivially. Perhaps that's why I present my argument as a joke. But the threshold counts all the same against falsification. You can't just arm chair a "nope" like that. That was really inconsiderate.

Instead of roots, take a step back and consider basic semantics. What's closer to yes: "true, good, to be, " or "that, there"?

And for a region, that happens to lie in the west of roma, what's more likely to be it's name "west" or "the country in which they say oc"?

No need to wonder.

The Occitan Wiktionary page https://oc.wiktionary.org/wiki/occitan says “Del latin medieval occitanus, que se tròba dins lingua occitana. Derivat de òc, benlèu sus lo modèl de aquitanus.” – the English Wiktionary page of same says “From Medieval Latin occitanus in the phrase lingua occitana, Latinization of langue d'oc. The ending -itanus perhaps after aquitanus.”

And Occident https://www.etymonline.com/word/occident “late 14c., "western part" (of the heavens or earth), from Old French occident (12c.) or directly from Latin occidentem (nominative occidens) "western sky, sunset, part of the sky in which the sun sets," noun use of adjective meaning "setting," from present participle of occidere "fall down, go down" (see occasion (n.)).”

Somebody would have wondered about the connection before, surely.

Even though I didn't particularly take to the sprinkling of profanity and hip-hop lingo I think "on some Slavic shit" roughly translates to "on some Slavic thing/trip" and isn't intended to be derogatory. Am open to corrections here.

The rest of your post I'm having a hard time disassembling. I don't think you can just free associate from one language to another switching between written and spoken changing alphabets along the way and between past and present. I mean, if you actually did come up with a valid and novel derivation of something that's the kind of thing one could put into a paper get peer reviewed and published.

>Even though I didn't particularly take to the sprinkling of profanity and hip-hop lingo I think "on some Slavic shit" roughly translates to "on some Slavic thing/trip" and isn't intended to be derogatory. Am open to corrections here.

Yeah, in the drive-by shootin kinda sense maybe, motherfucker.

> The rest of your post I'm having a hard time disassembling. I don't think you can just free associate from one language to another switching between written and spoken changing alphabets along the way and between past and present.

Of course you can freely associate, to a limited degree you even have to, because that's how language is being used. I'm pretty sure because, like, it still is, which I know, because sometimes I do go out. And I'd hazard a guess that before TV and public schooling, language was far more fractured and

> I mean, if you actually did come up with a valid and novel derivation of something that's the kind of thing one could put into a paper get peer reviewed and published.

I take that as a compliment. I could self publish like Martin Luther and start a new religion. I'd call it Euangelium ... So much for you can't just freely associate between written and spoken language.

Yeesh.

I'm sorry, that "mofo" was purely for illustrative purposes, although I might have Turret Syndrome.

Thanks, it wasn't me who downvoted you…

I didn't take it as disdain exactly. More like a meant-to-be-funny turn, almost self-deprecating. I doubt the author actually feels disdain for slavic languages.

Sardinian for yes is 'eja' which I've read is derived differently from the two methods suggested here though I haven't seen any suggestions on what that derivation might be.

Sounds a lot like "etiam" in Latin which if you break it apart looks like et + iam or "and now", but this site has some translations including "yes" http://archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookit.pl?latin=Etiam

I just suggested greek "eu" for oi in another comment. Close enough in my book.

One thing that is driving me crazy while learning Polish is that "no" means "yes" (informal).

The tone of the article has a certain “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” tinge to it.

Clearly intended because the whole point is that the relatively new use of "this" for affirmation online is... not new.

Great article. On a side note, I took five years of French and never learned that si is specifically for contradicting a negative. Sup with that.

As a native French speaker from Quebec, I can tell you it's much more common in France, so if you went to school in North America that might explain it.

In the US, french from France is taught. The Quebec dialect is barely mentioned.

Btw, in France, “si” in that context is not just common, but absolutely required. People would be confused if someone used “oui”.

It was covered in second year French when I studied it in India through Alliance Française.

On a similar vibe, in Catalan oi is used instead of sí in questions, like in "T'has menjat el desdejuni, oi?", which may surely come from oui or the ancient oil in French.

> so it was pronounced like “seek”

How do you know? I doubt it, but maybe my stress on seeek is just too long. Good to know it's not as sick, anyhow.

I believe ancient linguistic nuances like this are sometimes divined from formally structured poetry, among other sources. Also analysis of languages thought to share a common ancestor could imply near-identical pronunciation in the past

> I believe ancient linguistic nuances like this are sometimes divined from formally structured poetry

Given that formally structured poetry in English (not sure if the same is true of other current languages) often uses somewhat different from usual pronunciation (in ways that are both immediately obvious to a reader familiar with the poetic style, and understandable if unusual to a listener hearing the spoken poem), I would worry that leaning too heavily on this as evidence might potentially be misleading .

It would more likely be pronounced with a vowel sound similar to a long i in Italian, but this is a pretty good approximation for English speakers.

[Vox Latina](https://www.amazon.com/Vox-Latina-Guide-Pronunciation-Classi...) is a good resource for reconstructed classical pronunciation.

cf "What Latin Sounded Like - and how we know"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0

Interesting subject tainted by crappy narration.

Worked for me, and clearly for others.

This!

(Sorry... Fantastic article in any case. I send anything similar to a friend who studied linguistics. This one is going to her immediately.)

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 might be more in-depth material somewhere.)

Anyway, all of this is not aimed at you directly, but more of a general pondering of whether sending people articles on their subject matter is useful. Family members occasionally send me news articles on technology, which I usually find only moderately interesting.

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 Languedoc in France, which refers to the language its inhabitants speak (or used to speak).

Having say that, although I perfectly know about the distinction between languages of si, oil and oc, I was still intrigued enough to click on the article and it was a nice read (except for the tiny font) and I even learned something new: I didn't know that 'oc' was a calque from Gaulish 'to'.

The common case of people sending me articles about linguistics is worse: I often get heavily distorted pop-sci articles full of mistakes and misconceptions.

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?

Actually, funnily enough Languedoc does not exist anymore, it has been merged with Midi-Pyrénées to form a new region called Occitanie.

There were quite a few debates about the name as former Occitan-speaking territories were much larger, and Perpignan and it's area are in the Occitanie region despite being Catalan.

The point of the article is to say that using "this" in English as an affirmation is not a new phenomenon at all, and really, not wrong either (would we say it's wrong to say "oui" or "sí" or whatever is used in various Romance languages? no, we would not). That's a fair message to lay people and experts both.

Oc => Ok

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.

The tone is dismissive, duh.

Let's try another version, some Mexican shit. Trump comes to mind? Yup! You got it.

It is only dismissive ironically - the author is not really belittling Slavic languages. Context and intent are important, and it is possible to be unduly sensitive.

I think it is worth expecting readers to expend a small amount of effort to try and assess a writer's intent, so that we might live in a world where people can use colourful language. Teasing someone is not the same as insulting them.

In a world where pointing out that pure facts such as that Chicago has already had 200 gun homicides this year with its strict gun control laws will get you labelled as a white supremacist, I'd definitely like people to chill out, but alas, no.

As I said, context is important, and other people might perceive your intent incorrectly, depending on your choice of words, and your timing. People should not give a knee-jerk reaction without some effort to understand you, but if you ever feel you are misunderstood you should simply say so, and clarify what you mean. That way, people won't mistake you for a white supremacist.

How about the 2 downvotes my comment, (immediate parent of this comment of yours) received ? Think there was some bad context? Just proves me right.

I don't particularly understand why anyone would downvote you, but your comment didn't offer any reason why one would want to point out that Chicago has already had 200 gun homicides this year with its strict gun control laws, nor why that would result in one being labelled a white supremacist.

It is difficult for others to determine your intent without you providing additional context. That you are reporting a fact is immaterial - the question in others' minds will be why you are reporting that fact, because they are trying to understand what you are trying to show with it. As I said in a previous comment, context and intent are important, and if you are unwilling to provide those yourself, you have to accept that people may misunderstand you. Complaining about those misunderstandings is not constructive, you should simply try and clarify your position.

The more I see these types of confusion in forums, the more I get a sense that many people online (the number of online people is too great to make broad assumptions with certainty) simply don’t have good [enough] reading skills.

Moreover, as with any complex subject, there are possibly other limitations working in paralell (but still connected to the level of reading): the emotional state one’s in when it stumbles something in writing. Again, if one lacks a sufficiently mature reading skill, one tends to take things at face value, without making the obvious leap of understanding them within the larger context both of the text itself and the subject matter at hand.

It's probably quite out of context but I stumbled recently across the news that a left Swiss National Council named "Jonas Fricker" resigned from his position after comparing the transportation of pigs in cars as the Holocaust in one statement. It was obvious what mister Fricker mean't: That it's morally questionable to do harm to pigs. But many (jewish or not) people got frustrated "offline" at face value by his words. Since I mentioned Swiss politicians.. Some right politician "Roger Köppel" was verbally attacking federal president "Simonetta Sommaruga" - as a consequence the federal president and his committee left the federal courtroom. Obviously politics and online forums are not on the same level though - my point is you don't need to be bad in reading in order to feel offended by something (Swiss politicians should know how to read - should)

New account with apropos username, smells like performance art aka trolling.

It might not be cultural offence the GP is referring to, but imprecise language in an article about language.

"because they’re on some Slavic shit."

Did Romania at some point get invaded by some other Slav people, is it merely Slavic language osmosis between cross-border dialects?

If the casus belli for US entry into WW2 was referred to as "Some shit the Japanese pulled" in a piece about history, wouldn't that give you pause?

It was an opportunity to teach a reader something, but the opportunity was exchanged for a popular short-cut expression. If found that somewhat irksome as well, even though it did not offend my cultural identity.

I think it was more “an unrelated track of language that we’ll disregard for the purposes of this article”. Being “on that X shit” uses “shit” neutrally. It’s a flexible noun in this context. You can have “that good shit”, for example.

Thank you for your kind asking. When I had started with this article I literally stopped reading at said phrase. I guess my intetion by posting this comment on HN and not continuing reading was to show my disapproval with said phrase. I assume the author mixed his interesting article with humour in order to appeal to a broader audience. And as it goes with humour there is always someone or something being criticized (being made fun of). It seems to me, there is no way nobody will ever be offended by an article that uses humour. It's normal to me joking with people, being made fun of or make fun of people (minorities, majorities) or things. But this phrase was just too much in that particular moment. I guess there is a golden line between making fun of something but keeping a proper (or interesting) language while applying humour. John Oliver (HBO) as example makes fun of a lot of things but his tone is never like "people = shit". By having a second look at the article in order to see how other cultures might be offended I noticed that Slavic seems to be the only one being reduced that much.

I took your top-post as meant to be funny, because of your username; I laughed anyways.

Similarly, I took the author's "disdain" for slavic as not-real, but rather a meant-to-be-funny turn to avoid a detour into Romanian as the point of TFA was ultimately that the yeses in Romance languages generally derive from something like "this".

I am rather surprised you truly felt offended.

The point is it is really weird for Romanian to use "da" for yes, as that isn't Romance at all. But Romanian is interesting in that (much like English) it takes words from everything. The word for potato is "cartof", which is clearly from German "Kartoffel".

Reading through the comments for this submission, I can't believe how many people didn't understand the specific phrase "on some Slavic shit".

The phrase "on some shit" comes from the United States, from urban AAVE (African-American Vernacular English). There's another commenter that refers to the phrase as 'hip hop lingo', which isn't too far off, but I think it's the wrong label.

The origins of the phrase are hard to pin down, but nowadays you'll see the idiom as "on some ____ shit", where you replace the blank with just about any noun or adjective. It has a fairly wide range of meaning, but the gist is 'acting ____', 'referencing ____', 'influenced by ____', 'in the style of ____' .

In this article, writing about Romanian language, saying, "[they're] on some Slavic shit" means "[they're] influenced by Slavic" or "[they're] referencing the Slavic style".

Ordinarily I would just write "This." here, but given the context, let me say that I agree with your comment.

Cool article

Those are sum (sic) rhymes!

I love that the end of the bog on 'this' is a huge chain of people whose click of affection adds them to the list of '...x liked this' immediately after he says: I guess what I’m getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with “this,” or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying “Yeah, that”: you’re not new

Yaaassss https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/yas

yus?

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