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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").

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In Latin, adding the enclitic -ne to (generally) the first word of a sentence makes that sentence a yes/no question.

See https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , especially paragraph #332.

People have mentioned other languages (Polish, Latin, French, English) but the negation particles in all of those languages is from the same source (Proto-Indo-European "ne"). The Japanese one is entirely unrelated though.

Yeah and it's the same for German ne. Completely unrelated to Japanese.

Yes, that’s what I meant - all the languages that had already been mentioned are Indo-European, with the exception of Japanese.

Also Portuguese, where "né?" is understood as a contraction of "não é?" ("isn't it?").

I don't mean to say that this is a coincidence as far as the European languages go; negation words with N are often a shared inheritance from Indo-European

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Always felt funny to me how the common japanese immigrant stereotype in Brasil includes ending every question with "né?"

Makes total sense now.

Trinidadian English: "ent?"

I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence to make it a question with as few additional sounds as possible.

English English: "innit?"

I wonder if "ent" evolved from "innit" under British colonization (or they both evolved from a common ancestor in British English).

Both probably from "is it not > isn't it" Canadian's have 'eh?' that serves basically the same function.

Americans (and I'd imagine the British) have "eh?" too, it's just not as common ("not bad, eh?"). Among Americans I feel like I've seen it more in casual written online conversation than in speech.

In some places pronounced "ennit?"

A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"

And in Polish, where people often add a ", nie?" to the end of the sentence, with a similar result.

And in french with "non ?" at the end. Often pronounced "nanh" (english), "nan" (french). A more familiar form of "non".

On va prendre de l'essence d'abord, nan?

We're going to get gas first, right?

I've noticed a similar similarity between the particle "yo" in Japanese and adverb "ju" in Swedish, both used for the same purpose at the end of sentences.

A few more: Swedish:"tabberas"(eat everything) from Latin:"tabula rasa"(clean slate) <=> Japanese: "taberu"(eat).

Swedish:"må" <=> Japanese:"mo". "allowed to" Pronounced the same.

Expression: Swedish:"det går inte"(not possible, not allowed to), literally "that does not go" <=> Japanese:"ikemasen"(not allowed to), literally "can not go".

Same in Russian, no? (or should I say ne?)

And in Portuguese, né?

You can do that in English too.

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