Nepal's Kusunda language has no words for "yes" or "no"
bbc.com
bbc.com
> 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' '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.
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.
"I do not" => "En"
"(It) does not" => "Ei"
(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)
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.
If there is such a thing as Standard English, then it would allow phrases like “amn’t”, according to this definition anyway, as a casual style or register.
Evidently, it is usable to all speakers - you can come up with it yourself for the first time ever, and still be perfectly understood by every other speaker who hears it for the first time.
There is no One True Standard.
Also, you can abbreviate "it is" as "it's" and "is not" as "isn't", but what do you abbreviate "it is not" as?
But hey - if Stargate uses it (and they do - S09E04) then I'm willing to count it :)
That's not that uncommon, Scottish Gaelic and Irish, both spoken in the UK (take note British Broadcasting Corporation), have that same quirk—at least traditionally. There's some anecdotal evidence that with the number of non-native speakers learning the language, that Tá/Níl and Sea/Ní hea are starting to fill that gap in Irish.
> including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, [...], or any words for direction.
These are much more interesting features (or lack thereof)! Why wouldn't the article lead with that?
EDIT: This is even funnier after seeing that the author even has a name of Scottish Gaelic/Irish origin: Eileen McDougall.
They say "I haven't it" (they negate the verb)
(Which in English sound weird, but you can negate the verb without using 'no')
But yes, officially and historically the correct response was like "Níl aon tickead agam" or "There is no ticket on me", or less directly translated/less awkwardly "I don't have a ticket"
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.
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
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).
Weird to see that not only has yes/no come into the English spoken in Ireland, but is now being backported to the Gaelic.
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
- Níl sé agam
- is-NEG it.NOM at-me
"Do you have it?"
"Not on me / I don't have it on me" = it's not on my person.
- An bhfuil do thicéad agat? (LIT: is your ticket at-you?)
- (interrogative) is your ticket at-you?
- Tá mo thicéad agam.
- is my ticket at-me.
- Níl mo thicéad agam.
- Ní-fhuil
- not-is my ticket at-me.
- An gcanann tú?
- (interrogative) sing you?
- Canann mé / Canaim
- sing I / sing-1st.pres
- Ní chanann mé / Ní chanaim
- not sing I / not sing-1st.pres
EDIT: Unfortunately, code blocks are necessary for alignment, so I've added '-' to the beginning of each line to aid in legibility on mobile.
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.
Also, you don't have to repeat the pronoun (unless it is one with the analytic form).
An gcanann sé? Canann.
Have you mixed up analytic and synthetic? Analytic = Canann mé, 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.
Interesting; same root as Italian 'cantare'.
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.
"Tha" - pronounced like "Haa" - is more like "It is" or "I am", "A'bheil thu sgìth?" "Tha, tha mi sgìth." "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.
> Am bidh thu sgìth? Are you tired? (regularly)
Would you answer "Bidh", "Tha", or "Tha, bidh mi sgìth"?
Do you have a pen? Have Not have
"Gan Bearla" or "Without English" would have been an equally short title without resorting to a bilingual title.
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]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize <-- Gàidhlig / Gaeilge / Cymraeg language options available
Gàidhlig
- 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
Gaeilge
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p084p79m <-- not a dedicated channel like Gàidhlig 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 Gàidhlig is better served than Gaeilge but my feeling is that those looking for Gaeilge resources are probably looking elsewhere ;-)
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
“Are you posting on Hacker News?”
“I am.”
Easy.
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.
It seems like maybe you could just say "no beat" and there's no linguistic trap.
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.
The correct answer to this perennial bad riddle is "only because your mom got jealous".
Surely this explains that Chinese bootleg Star Wars translation meme where Darth Vader's "Nooo" is subtitled as "Do not want"?
Jokes aside, yes that make sense, you could express your regret or refusal by saying 我不要！ or you could say something like ‘how awful!’ Chinese translated literally sometimes feels so corny.
Lip syncing can't be a concern, because the chorus is not visible. The background characters on screen are not singing.
How about "ffffuuuuuuuck!" etc?
肏, often euphemistically spelled as 操. But also commonly seen in the expression 我操, which would be two words.
You can analyze 不要 in the use under discussion as one word, or as two. There's no rule that says a word can't be more than one syllable long, but then again 不要 is not exactly etymologically opaque.
Side note just to illustrate how filthy and vulgar 肏 is: it’s constructed of 入 and 肉. 入 means enter, go into, like 入口 is entrance. 肉 means meat or flesh, like beef 牛肉 or muscle 肌肉.
(Which I was actually less surprised by than when I heard someone make fun of herself by saying 傻屄的我...)
> just to illustrate how filthy and vulgar 肏 is: it’s constructed of 入 and 肉. 入 means enter, go into, like 入口 is entrance.
Occasionally I wonder, if 入口 is entrance, what is the character 如 supposed to represent? Nobody objects to that one.
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.
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.
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.)
As the quote suggests, it very much is obvious to anyone who has felt the need to coin a new term in order to reduce difficulty in thinking about a concept.
This is going a little too far; 是的 is a direct equivalent of "yes".
- 對,我喜歡
Sounds fine to me.
Though I suppose that's more like saying "That's correct/right, I like hiking."
As with 是的, that isn't true.
I knew one Chinese person who was very definite that 它 could not be used to refer to an inanimate object such as a folder or notebook. Instead, the object must be referred to with 这个.
But I know other Chinese people who routinely refer to inanimate objects with 它.
But don't you think it's strange to claim that there is no English equivalent of an English word?
Where you can say 是的，我最喜欢爬山, you can obviously also just say 是的.
I’d say the closest to yes is 嗯
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 你不是犹太人吧？, and I responded 是的, what would you think?
However, I do see Chinese making mistakes in English and English speakers making mistakes in Chinese and I am not 100% free of the guilt.
In the question "你不是犹太人吧？" there is already a "是“ in it, so a native speaker would use "对“ or "没错“ instead of "是的". They all means "correct" but by avoiding using "是" again, the chance of misunderstanding is minimized.
> There are clear rules in English and Chinese.
> They all mean "correct" but by avoiding using "是" again, the chance of misunderstanding is minimized.
If the rules were clear, there would be no misunderstanding.
你去不去商店吗? (Are you going to the store?)
The way to answer is either going (去) or not going (不去). There are a lot of phrase for "that's right" or similar, but that's not the same as "yes."
Mandarin has no word directly mapping to "yes."
Your example is not in the form of a yes-or-no question[1], so it's not surprising or interesting that the answer can't be "yes". We see exactly the same phenomenon in English:
Q: Are you going to the store or staying home?
A: *Yes
[1] Admittedly, the presence of 吗 makes this claim weaker.
(I started typing 你去不去商店 and changed part-way)
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.
That goes a bit too far. It would certainly be understood, but be considered quirky, or an indication that you're not a native speaker.
My kids are bilingual German/Mandarin, and use it like that quite a bit.
(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.)
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.
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 Tá/Níl 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 Tá/Yes and Níl/No options on professionally translated forms that may also have primed this development.
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 Gaeilgeoirí -- 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 Tá/Níl 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 Tá/Yes and Níl/No options on professionally translated forms that may also have primed this development.
And those forms are purposefully translated so that Tá/Yes Níl/No is an answer to an "An bhfuil" question, following proper Irish grammar (usually "An bhfuil tú i bhfábhar ...").
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)
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.
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.
"sic" -> si/sim (italian, spanish, portuguese)
"hoc" -> oc (occitan)
"hoc ille" -> oui (french)
Tu ne m’aimes pas, n’est-ce pas ? — Si !
You don’t like me, do you? — Yes, I do!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"
You don’t like me, do 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.
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.
Yes it is/doch/si! :) Because OP misunderstood, "doch" is used exactly the same way as the french "si" and as you described.
"Du magst mich nicht?" You don't like me? "Doch" Yes I do.
So yes, the same as the French «Sí» as others have explained it.
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...
Do you not like me?
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".
"ita" ('it is so', 'indeed')
"ita vero" ('it is so, truly')
"maxime" ('entirely')
"valde" ('very much (so)')
"vere" ('truly')
There are great circumlocutions for "no". I remember Nancy Llewellyn had a whole list, including "haud quaquam" ('hardly/scarcely to any degree'), "nullo modo" and "nullo pacto" ('in no way'), and "nullactenus" ('to no extent'). Latin students are most often taught "minime" ('minimally', 'scarcely').
Without the circumlocutions I think you would simply do what so many other languages described here do, which is repeat the main verb of a question, either negated or not negated.
Even in Classical Latin “ita” was pretty close to yes.
I think an ancient Roman would understand and possibly use sic and ita much as we use “yes”.
But it’s been a while. My Latin is rusty.
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
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.
[0] Haviland 2008, Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25
[1] François 2005, The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-...
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.
In computer dialogues you see いいえ, also if im not mistaken people say いいえ when they are flattered.
When you give a Japanese person a compliment the most comment response IME is いいえ (nooo I’m not)
And はい is said all the time
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’.
(It's weird to think about grammar sometimes in a language you just grow up with.)
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.
Reasonable people can disagree, but I think it's safe to say that mh would be broadly considered a word by most. And anyway, languages are generally not defined by how they are written, but by how they are spoken. Indeed many languages have no formal written form (heck, in cantonese there are major grammatical words with no written form at all.)
> By the way, it is "m" for 5 in Cantonese.
It is ngh, low rising tone. I'm sure you can verify this online.
There is no official romanization of Cantonese. Both the negative prefix `mh` and 5 are bilabial nasal, not velar nasal. They are of different tones though. Ans also as I pointed out earlier, there are velar nasals in Cantonese. to use your own logic:
> languages are generally not defined by how they are written, but by how they are spoken
So here is my understanding: one nasal that is never used in isolation is not a word.
There is, it is called 粵拼 or Jyutping (https://www.lshk.org/jyutping). However, its use is not enforced, and the original British colonial era romanisation remains frequently used in HK.
There is also the Yale system that predates Jyutping and is still also in wide use in teaching materials and dictionaries.
Therefore, 唔 is romanised as «m4» in Jyuping and as «m̀ h» in Yale. «4» in Jyutping and the backtick over «m» indicate the low falling tone.
You've never been asked "yao bu yao"?
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
Note that both comments replying to you misunderstood in the same way.
> But there's also a word for negation which is how Chinese gets around not having no
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)
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
Rather, Chinese responds indicates affirmative or negative by repeating the verb of the question in either plain or negated form.
e.g.
Q: Do you like hot pot? A: like | not like Q: ni xihuan huoguo ma? A: xihuan | bu xihuan
Q: Do you have covid? A: have | not have Q: ni you mei you wuhan feiyan? A: you | meiyou
Q: Are you american? A: is | is not Q: ni shi meiguoren ma? A: shi | bu shi
etc.
This was quite strange to get used to, but makes perfect sense once internalized.
E.g. Q: Aren't you finished yet?
Answering 'yes' or 'no' would be ambiguous
"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?"
"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."
好 = OK,
是 = Is,
Both are used to mean yes
不要 = Don't want,
不用 = Don't need,
Both are used to mean no
I wonder how you can be a fluent speaker if you have nobody to talk to?
see what I did there?