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Comment by cgsullivan | Hacker News Reader

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

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Unsurprisingly, it's similar in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. Mandarin and Cantonese (and probably other Sinitic languages) don't either, with much the same arrangement as the Celtic languages.

Enter 嗯(polyphonic)：

ng1: indeed, so what? ng2: huh? ng3: what? ng4: yeah, yes. ng~: nooo.

In Welsh there's (Nag-)Ydw and (Nag-)Oes, and Dim.

No Shi? I had no idea about Mandarin.

There are many yes-like words, but not exactly "yes". There's "it is", "it's correct", and "it's good" that may be used depending on context to mean yes.

Shi means "is", not "yes" in Mandarin.

who sais yes isn't a contraction of i'is

Surprisingly, this is partially true. It's a contraction but an older one.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes

Amazing! I wonder about the universality of head nods (for yes) and head shakes (for no), and whether languages that lack a "yes" or "no" might still use nods.

Not universal, a few exceptions[1] :

> There are several exceptions: in Greece, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria,[2] Albania, and Sicily a single nod of the head up (not down) indicates a "no".

Though for Bulgaria at least it seems it's shifting with many people who lived abroad at some point(myself included) and have picked up the correct/more universal form. Which makes it worse: Now no one really knows whether you mean yes or no...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nod_(gesture)

There's also the head bobble, common in south India, which looks a lot like an ongoing head shake but generally means something like ongoing agreement.

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

Referring to it as "ongoing agreement" reminds me of something I think of as the "confessional no." When addicts talk about their addiction, there's often a rhythmic shaking of the head from side to side like a continual "no," but that speeds up and slows down with some relationship to the grammar of the sentences used.

You can probably make yourself do it by saying out loud: "When I was young, I thought I understood everything." It's like an ongoing disagreement.

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