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> You answer a question with the verb that was asked. ‘Do you like coffee?’ ‘Like!’ or ‘不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

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 ‘幹！’

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.

These days a lot of Mandarin video translations do just use "bù!" or "oh bù!", even though it's not grammatically correct and technically meaningless, just because it tends not to ruin the lipsyncing.

The Taiwanese dub of "We don't talk about Bruno" uses Oh不 (actually, more like Woh不) 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.

That's it exactly. "要" means "want", and "不要" means "not want".

Yes, because that's what a Mandarin-speaking Darth Vader would have said in that context. 不要 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!"

So does this mean that there isn't a simple, single word exclamation in Mandarin to denote "Nooooooo!"?

How about "ffffuuuuuuuck!" etc?

> How about "ffffuuuuuuuck!"

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.

Might be a Taiwan thing but the equivalent exclamation to ‘fuck!’ here is ‘幹！’, like ‘fuck, I lost my keys’. I’ve only seen/heard 肏 used in the sense of literal copulation, like ‘fuck your mom!’ as an insult, but not as an interjection.

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.

我肏 is very common on the mainland. I don't know about bare 肏. But I can assure you that 我肏 is used as an interjection; I have even seen it used by girls.

(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.

不要 is a single word/lexeme in the linguistic sense, even if it is two syllables.

I read this response to my wife and she's in stitches.

> 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.

The book is "Through the Language Glass", which I agree is very good.

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.

> 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.)

You've got some very significant equivocation going on there though. The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that the lack of a familiar term makes things difficult to think. The obvious proof of the weak hypothesis proves that lack of a familiar term makes concepts difficult to express. It is not obvious that difficulty in coining a term reflected any difficulty in thinking of the concept.

> It is not obvious that difficulty in coining a term reflected any difficulty in thinking of the concept.

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.

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

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.

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.

> "Have you stopped beating your wife"?

The correct answer to this perennial bad riddle is "only because your mom got jealous".

I think I’d have trouble explaining this joke to someone. There is a way to say ‘I’ve stopped’: 我停止了, but I think they’d probably just answer me 我從來沒有打過我的太太 ‘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.

I'm not sure how that's any less ambiguous than answering "I don't beat her".

> Mandarin also does not have direct equivalents of ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

This is going a little too far; 是的 is a direct equivalent of "yes".

It is different. "是的" means "That's correct"; So if someone ask me "you don't smoke?" and I answer "是的" that means I don't smoke, which is actually what "no" means in standard English.

> So if someone ask me "you don't smoke?" and I answer "是的" 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 你不是犹太人吧？, and I responded 是的, what would you think?

There are clear rules in English and Chinese. English is absolute so "yes" means I am. Chinese is an echo language so "是的" means you are correct that I am not.

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.

I guess I have to draw your attention to these two sentences:

> 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.

I mean there are clear rules in both English and Chinese `officially`. However, Chinese is such a lax language and can convey very different meanings with just tone differences, you don't want to take the chance if there is a better way.

I think a better example wouldn't use 是. For example:

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."

I put the 是 in that example on purpose, because it forces the response 是的 to be ambiguous between opposite meanings.

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.

Sorry. Typo. Take 你去商店吗

(I started typing 你去不去商店 and changed part-way)

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?’ 「是的」 would make sense to say yes. But it wouldn’t work as an answer like ‘yes, I like hiking’.

https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/1947367332200522468.html

Where you can say 是的，我最喜欢爬山, you can obviously also just say 是的.

The full answer is ok, but just 是的 sounds weird even though people would understand your intent.

I suppose 對 would be able to cover the rest of the contexts.

That’s still not complete. You wouldn’t answer 對 to the question “do you like hiking?”. The standard answer would be “like”. Or the versatile 嗯

- 你喜歡爬山嗎?

- 對,我喜歡

Sounds fine to me.

Though I suppose that's more like saying "That's correct/right, I like hiking."

Yea exactly. In that phrasing you're putting an affirmation to the original question. Just "對" doesn't work.

> Just "對" doesn't work.

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.

The overall point is there isn't a single "yes". The equivalent of "yes" takes various forms depending on the context. "是的", "对" etc can all work depending on the question.

By that argument, English also has no direct equivalent of "yes". Sometimes you say "right". (Compare 对.) Sometimes you say "sure".

But don't you think it's strange to claim that there is no English equivalent of an English word?

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 對 doesn't actually mean "yes" in the same way the word "yes" does.

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 嗯

> 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.

> There is a negator word 不 bù, but just answering 「不」 wouldn’t make sense.

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.