''Yes'' and ''no'', or word pairs with similar words, are expressions of
the affirmative and the negative, respectively, in several languages, including
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
. Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions and may have three-form or four-form systems. English originally used a four-form system up to and including
Early Middle English and
Modern English has reduced to a two-form system consisting of 'yes' and 'no'. It exists in many facets of communication, such as: eye blink communication, head movements, Morse Code, and sign language. Some languages, such as Latin, do not have yes-no word systems.
Answering yes/no question with single words meaning 'yes' or 'no' is by no means universal. Probably about half the world's languages typically employ an
echo response: repeating the verb in the question in an affirmative or a negative form. Some of these also have optional words for 'yes' and 'no', like
Hungarian,
Russian , and
Portuguese. Others simply don't have designated yes/no words, like
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
,
Irish,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
,
Thai , and
Chinese. Echo responses avoid the issue of what an unadorned ''yes'' means in response to a negative question. Yes and no can be used as a response to a variety of situationsbut are better suited when asked simple questions. While a ''yes'' response to the question, "You don't like strawberries?" is ambiguous in English, the Welsh response ' (I am) has no ambiguity.
The words ''
yes
Yes or YES may refer to:
* An affirmative particle in the English language; see yes and no
Education
* YES Prep Public Schools, Houston, Texas, US
* YES (Your Extraordinary Saturday), a learning program from the Minnesota Institute for Talent ...
'' and ''
no'' are not easily classified into any of the eight conventional
parts of speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...
. Sometimes classified as
interjections, they do not qualify as such, and they are not
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s. They are sometimes classified as a part of speech in their own right,
sentence words, or
pro-sentences, although that category contains more than ''yes'' and ''no'', and not all linguists include them in their lists of sentence words. Sentences consisting solely of one of these two words are classified as
minor sentences.
Classification of English grammar
Although sometimes classified as
interjections, these words do not express emotion or act as calls for attention; they are not
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s because they do not qualify any verb, adjective, or adverb. They are sometimes classified as a part of speech in their own right: sentence words or word sentences.
This is the position of
Otto Jespersen, who states that Yes' and 'No'... are to all intents and purposes sentences just as much as the most delicately
balanced sentences ever uttered by
Demosthenes
Demosthenes (; el, Δημοσθένης, translit=Dēmosthénēs; ; 384 – 12 October 322 BC) was a Greek statesman and orator in ancient Athens. His orations constitute a significant expression of contemporary Athenian intellectual pr ...
or penned by
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...
."
Georg von der Gabelentz,
Henry Sweet
Henry Sweet (15 September 1845 – 30 April 1912) was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian.''Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language'', as hosted oencyclopedia.com/ref>
As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic l ...
, and
Philipp Wegener have all written on the subject of sentence words. Both Sweet and Wegener include ''yes'' and ''no'' in this category, with Sweet treating them separately from both imperatives and interjections, although Gabelentz does not.
Watts classifies ''yes'' and ''no'' as
grammatical particles, in particular ''response particles''. He also notes their relationship to the interjections ''
oh'' and ''
ah'', which is that the interjections can precede ''yes'' and ''no'' but not follow them. ''Oh'' as an interjection expresses surprise, but in the combined forms ''oh yes'' and ''oh no'' merely acts as an
intensifier; but ''ah'' in the combined forms ''ah yes'' and ''ah no'' retains its stand-alone meaning, of focusing upon the previous speaker's or writer's last statement. The forms ''*yes oh'', ''*yes ah'', ''*no oh'', and ''*no ah'' are grammatically ill-formed. Aijmer similarly categorizes the ''yes'' and ''no'' as ''response signals'' or ''reaction signals''.
Ameka classifies these two words in different ways according to the context. When used as
back-channel items, he classifies them as interjections; but when they are used as the responses to a
yes–no question, he classifies them as formulaic words. The distinction between an interjection and a formula is, in Ameka's view, that the former does not have an addressee (although it may be directed at a person), whereas the latter does. The ''yes'' or ''no'' in response to the question is addressed at the interrogator, whereas ''yes'' or ''no'' used as a back-channel item is a ''feedback usage'', an utterance that is said to oneself. However, Sorjonen criticizes this analysis as lacking empirical work on the other usages of these words, in addition to interjections and feedback uses.
Bloomfield and Hockett classify the words, when used to answer yes-no questions, as ''special completive interjections''. They classify sentences comprising solely one of these two words as
minor sentences.
Sweet classifies the words in several ways. They are sentence-modifying adverbs, adverbs that act as modifiers to an entire sentence. They are also sentence words, when standing alone. They may, as question responses, also be absolute forms that correspond to what would otherwise be the ''not'' in a negated echo response. For example, a "No." in response to the question "Is he here?" is equivalent to the echo response "He is not here." Sweet observes that there is no correspondence with a simple ''yes'' in the latter situation, although the sentence-word "Certainly." provides an absolute form of an emphatic echo response "He is certainly here." Many other adverbs can also be used as sentence words in this way.
Unlike ''yes'', ''no'' can also be an adverb of degree, applying to adjectives solely in the comparative (e.g., ''no greater'', ''no sooner'', but not ''no soon'' or ''no soonest''), and an adjective when applied to nouns (e.g., "He is no fool." and Dyer's "No clouds, no vapours intervene.").
Grammarians of other languages have created further, similar, special classifications for these types of words. Tesnière classifies the French ''oui'' and ''non'' as ''phrasillons logiques'' (along with ''
voici''). Fonagy observes that such a classification may be partly justified for the former two, but suggests that ''
pragmatic
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement.
Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to:
*Pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy
* Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics and semiotics
*'' Pragmatics'', an academic journal i ...
holophrases'' is more appropriate.
The Early English four-form system
While Modern English has a ''two-form system'' of ''yes'' and ''no'' for affirmatives and negatives, earlier forms of English had a ''four-form system'', comprising the words ''yea'', ''
nay'', ''yes'', and ''no''. ''Yes'' contradicts a negatively formulated question, ''No'' affirms it; ''Yea'' affirms a positively formulated question, ''Nay'' contradicts it.
*Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
*Will they not go? — No, they will not.
*Will they go? — Yea, they will.
*Will they go? — Nay, they will not.
This is illustrated by the following passage from
Much Ado about Nothing:
[ (editorial footnotes)]
Benedick's answer of ''yea'' is a correct application of the rule, but as observed by W. A. Wright "Shakespeare does not always observe this rule, and even in the earliest times the usage appears not to have been consistent." Furness gives as an example the following, where Hermia's answer should, in following the rule, have been ''yes'':
This subtle grammatical feature of Early Modern English is recorded by Sir
Thomas More in his critique of
William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament into Early Modern English, which was then quoted as an authority by later scholars:
In fact, More's exemplification of the rule actually contradicts his statement of what the rule is. This went unnoticed by scholars such as
Horne Tooke
John Horne Tooke (25 June 1736 – 18 March 1812), known as John Horne until 1782 when he added the surname of his friend William Tooke to his own, was an English clergyman, politician, and philologist. Associated with radical proponents of parl ...
,
Robert Gordon Latham, and Trench, and was first pointed out by
George Perkins Marsh
George Perkins Marsh (March 15, 1801July 23, 1882), an American diplomat and philologist, is considered by some to be America's first environmentalist and by recognizing the irreversible impact of man's actions on the earth, a precursor to the ...
in his ''Century Dictionary'', where he corrects More's incorrect statement of the first rule, "''No'' aunswereth the question framed by the affirmative.", to read ''nay''. That even More got the rule wrong, even while himself dressing down Tyndale for getting it wrong, is seen by Furness as evidence that the four word system was "too subtle a distinction for practice".
Marsh found no evidence of a four-form system in
Mœso-Gothic, although he reported finding "traces" in
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...
. He observed that in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels,
*positively phrased questions are answered positively with ''
gea'' (John 21:15,16,
King James Version
The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of K ...
: "Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee" etc.)
*and negatively with ''
ne'' (Luke 12:51, KJ: "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division"; 13:4,5, KJ: "Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."), ''
nese'' (John 21:5 "Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any meat? They answered him, No."; Matthew 13:28,29, KJ: "The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them."), and ''
nic
NIC may refer to:
Banking and insurance companies
* National Insurance Corporation, Uganda
* NIC Bank, a commercial bank in Kenya
Politics, government and economics
* National Ice Center, an agency that provides worldwide navigational ice a ...
'' meaning "not I" (John 18:17, KJ: "Then saith the damsel that kept the door unto Peter, Art not thou also one of this man's disciples? He saith, I am not.");
*while negatively phrased questions are answered positively with ''
gyse'' (Matthew 17:25, KJ: "they that received tribute money came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay tribute? He saith, Yes.")
*and negatively for example with ''
nâ'', meaning "no one" (John 8:10,11, "he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord.").
Marsh calls this four-form system of Early Modern English a "needless subtlety". Tooke called it a "ridiculous distinction", with Marsh concluding that Tooke believed Thomas More to have simply made this rule up and observing that Tooke is not alone in his disbelief of More. Marsh, however, points out (having himself analyzed the works of
John Wycliffe,
Geoffrey Chaucer,
John Gower,
John Skelton, and
Robert of Gloucester, and ''
Piers Plowman'' and ''
Le Morte d'Arthur
' (originally written as '; inaccurate Middle French for "The Death of Arthur") is a 15th-century Middle English prose reworking by Sir Thomas Malory of tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the ...
'') that the distinction both existed and was generally and fairly uniformly observed in Early Modern English from the time of Chaucer to the time of Tyndale. But after the time of Tyndale, the four-form system was rapidly replaced by the modern two-form system.
Three-form systems
Several languages have a ''three-form system'', with two affirmative words and one negative. In a three-form system, the affirmative response to a positively phrased question is the
unmarked affirmative, the affirmative response to a negatively phrased question is the
marked
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
affirmative, and the negative response to both forms of question is the (single) negative. For example, in Norwegian the affirmative answer to "Snakker du norsk?" ("Do you speak Norwegian?") is "Ja", and the affirmative answer to "Snakker du ikke norsk?" ("Do you not speak Norwegian?") is "Jo", while the negative answer to ''both'' questions is "Nei".
Danish,
Swedish,
Norwegian,
Icelandic,
Faroese,
Hungarian,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
,
Dutch,
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
and
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry ( Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam wa ...
all have three-form systems. Swedish and Danish have , , and . Norwegian has , , and . Icelandic has , , and . Faroese has , , and . Hungarian has , , and . German has , , and . Dutch has , , and . French has , , and . Malayalam has , and . Though, technically Malayalam is a multi-form system of Yes and No as can be seen from below, the former are the formal words for Yes and No.
Swedish, and to some extent Danish and Norwegian, also have additional forms ''
javisst'' and ''
jovisst'', analogous to ''ja'' and ''jo'', to indicate a strong affirmative response. Swedish (and Danish slang) also have the forms ''joho'' and ''nehej'', which both indicate stronger response than ''jo'' or ''nej''. ''Jo'' can also be used as an emphatic contradiction of a negative statement.
And Malayalam has the additional forms , and which act like question words, question tags or to strengthen the affirmative or negative response, indicating stronger meaning than , and . The words , , , , , and work in the same ways. These words also sound more polite as they don't sound like curt when saying "No!" or "Yes!". means "it is there" and the word behaves as an affirmative response like . The usage of to simply mean "No" or "No way!", is informal and may be casual or sarcastic, while is the more formal way of saying "false", "incorrect" or that "it is not" and is a negative response for questions. The word has a stronger meaning than . is used to mean "OK" or "correct", with the opposite meaning "not OK" or "not correct". It is used to answer affirmatively to questions to confirm any action by the asker, but to answer negatively one says . and both mean to "want" and to "not want".
Other languages with four-form systems
Like Early Modern English, the
Romanian language
Romanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: ''limba română'' , or ''românește'', ) is the official and main language of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. As a minority language it is spoken by stable communities in ...
has a four-form system. The affirmative and negative responses to positively phrased questions are ''
da'' and ''
nu'', respectively. But in responses to negatively phrased questions they are prefixed with ''
ba'' (i.e. ''ba da'' and ''ba nu''). ''nu'' is also used as a negation adverb, infixed between subject and verb. Thus, for example, the affirmative response to the negatively phrased question "N-ai plătit?" ("Didn't you pay?") is "Ba da." ("Yes."—i.e. "I did pay."), and the negative response to a positively phrased question beginning "Se poate să ...?" ("Is it possible to ...?") is "Nu, nu se poate." ("No, it is not possible."—note the use of ''nu'' for both ''no'' and negation of the verb.)
Related words in other languages and translation problems
Bloomfield and Hockett observe that not all languages have ''special completive interjections''.
Finnish
Finnish does not generally answer yes-no questions with either adverbs or interjections but answers them with a repetition of the verb in the question,
negating it if the answer is the negative. (This is an
echo response.) The answer to "Tuletteko kaupungista?" ("Are you coming from town?") is the verb form itself, "Tulemme." ("We are coming.") However, in spoken Finnish, a simple "Yes" answer is somewhat more common, "Joo."
Negative questions are answered similarly. Negative answers are just the negated verb form. The answer to "Tunnetteko herra Lehdon?" ("Do you know Mr Lehto?") is "En tunne" ("I don't know.") or simply "En." ("I don't.").
However, Finnish also has particle words for "yes": "Kyllä" (formal) and "joo" (colloquial). A yes-no question can be answered "yes" with either "kyllä" or "joo", which are not conjugated according to the person and plurality of the verb. "Ei", however, is always conjugated and means "no".
Estonian
Estonian
Estonian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe
* Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent
* Estonian language
* Estonian cuisine
* Estonian culture
See also
*
...
has a structure similar to Finnish, with both repetitions and interjections. means "yes". Unlike Finnish, the negation particle is always , regardless of person and plurality. ("am/are/is not") can be replaced by (a contraction of the ancient expression , meaning the same).
The word ,
cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical ef ...
to Finnish , can be used to reply positively to a negative question: ("You don't speak Finnish?" "Yes, I do!") It can also be used to approve a positive statement: ("You (unexpectedly) came along!" "Yes I did.")
Latvian
Up until the 16th century
Latvian did not have a word for "yes" and the common way of responding affirmatively to a question was by repeating the question's verb, just as in Finnish. The modern day was borrowed from
Middle High German
Middle High German (MHG; german: Mittelhochdeutsch (Mhd.)) is the term for the form of German spoken in the High Middle Ages. It is conventionally dated between 1050 and 1350, developing from Old High German and into Early New High German. Hig ...
and first appeared in 16th-century religious texts, especially
catechism
A catechism (; from grc, κατηχέω, "to teach orally") is a summary or exposition of doctrine and serves as a learning introduction to the Sacraments traditionally used in catechesis, or Christian religious teaching of children and adul ...
s, in answers to questions about faith. At that time such works were usually translated from German by non-Latvians that had learned Latvian as a foreign language. By the 17th century, was being used by some Latvian speakers that lived near the cities, and more frequently when speaking to non-Latvians, but they would revert to agreeing by repeating the question verb when talking among themselves. By the 18th century the use of was still of low frequency, and in Northern Vidzeme the word was almost non-existent until the 18th and early 19th century. Only in the mid-19th century did really become usual everywhere.
Welsh
It is often assumed that
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
has no words at all for ''yes'' and ''no''. It has and , and ''
do'' and ''
naddo''. However, these are used only in specialized circumstances and are some of the ways in Welsh of saying yes or no. ''Ie'' and ''nage'' are used to respond to sentences of simple identification, while ''do'' and ''naddo'' are used to respond to questions specifically in the past tense. As in Finnish, the main way to state yes or no, in answer to yes-no questions, is to echo the verb of the question. The answers to "'" ("Is Ffred coming?") are either "'" ("He is (coming).") or "'" ("He is not (coming)"). In general, the negative answer is the positive answer combined with . For more information on ''yes'' and ''no'' answers to yes-no questions in Welsh, see Jones, listed in
further reading
Further or Furthur may refer to:
* ''Furthur'' (bus), the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic bus
* Further (band), a 1990s American indie rock band
* Furthur (band), a band formed in 2009 by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh
* ''Further'' (The Chemical Brothers a ...
.
Goidelic languages
The
Goidelic languages
The Goidelic or Gaelic languages ( ga, teangacha Gaelacha; gd, cànanan Goidhealach; gv, çhengaghyn Gaelgagh) form one of the two groups of Insular Celtic languages, the other being the Brittonic languages.
Goidelic languages historically ...
(
Irish,
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...
and
Manx) do not have words for ''yes'' or ''no'' at all. Instead, an
echo response of the main verb used to ask the question is used. Sometimes, one of the words meaning "to be" (Irish ' or ', see
Irish syntax § The forms meaning "to be"; Scottish Gaelic ' or ' see
Scottish Gaelic grammar § verbs; Manx ' or ') is used. For example, the Irish question "'" ("Is he coming?") may be answered ''""'' ("Is") or ''""'' ("Is not"). More frequently, another verb will be used. For example, to respond to "'" ("Did he hear?"), "'" ("Heard") or "'" ("Did not hear") are used. Irish people frequently give echo answers in English as well, e.g. "Did you hear?" Answer "I heard/I did".
Latin
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
has no single words for ''yes'' and ''no''. Their functions as word sentence responses to yes-no questions are taken up by ''sentence adverbs'', single adverbs that are sentence modifiers and also used as word sentences. There are several such adverbs classed as
truth-value adverbs—including , , , , , , , , and (negative). They express the speaker's/writer's feelings about the truth value of a proposition. They, in conjunction with the negator , are used as responses to yes-no questions.
For example:
Latin also employs echo responses.
Galician and Portuguese
These languages have words for ''yes'' and ''no'', namely and in
Galician and and in
Portuguese. However, answering a question with them is less idiomatic than answering with the verb in the proper conjugation.
Spanish
In
Spanish, the words 'yes' and 'no' are unambiguously classified as adverbs: serving as answers to questions and also modifying verbs. The affirmative can replace the verb after a negation ( = ''I don't own a car, but he does'') or intensify it (''I don't believe he owns a car. / He does own one!'' = ). The word is the standard adverb placed next to a verb to negate it ( = ''I don't own a car''). Double negation is normal and valid in Spanish, and it is interpreted as reinforcing the negation ( = ''I own no car'').
Chinese
Speakers of
Chinese use echo responses.
In all
Sinitic/Chinese languages,
yes-no questions are often posed in
A-not-A form, and the replies to such questions are
echo answer
In linguistics, an echo answer or echo response is a way of answering a polar question without using words for yes and no. The verb used in the question is simply echoed in the answer, negated if the answer has a negative truth-value. For example ...
s that echo either ''A'' or ''not A''. In
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
, the closest equivalents to ''yes'' and ''no'' are to state "" (; ) and "" (; ). The phrase () may also be used for the interjection "no". Similarly, in
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding a ...
, the preceding are 係 ''hai6'' (lit: "is") and 唔係 (lit: "not is") ''m4 hai6'', respectively. One can also answer 冇錯 ''mou5 co3'' () for the affirmative, although there is no corresponding negative to this.
Japanese
Japanese lacks words for ''yes'' and ''no''. The words "" (''hai'') and "" (''iie'') are mistaken by English speakers for equivalents to ''yes'' and ''no'', but they actually signify agreement or disagreement with the proposition put by the question: "That's right." or "That's not right."
For example: if asked, , answering with the affirmative "はい" would mean "Right, I am ''not'' going"; whereas in English, answering "yes" would be to contradict the negative question. Echo responses are not uncommon in Japanese.
Complications
These differences between languages make translation difficult. No two languages are
isomorphic
In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word i ...
at the most elementary level of words for ''yes'' and ''no''. Translation from two-form to three-form systems are equivalent to what English-speaking school children learning French or German encounter. The mapping becomes complex when converting two-form to three-form systems. There are many idioms, such as reduplication (in French, German, and Italian) of affirmatives for emphasis (the German ).
The mappings are one-to-many in both directions. The German has no fewer than 13 English equivalents that vary according to context and usage (''yes'', ''yeah'', and ''no'' when used as an answer; ''well'', ''all right'', ''so'', and ''now'', when used for segmentation; ''oh'', ''ah'', ''uh'', and ''eh'' when used an interjection; and ''do you'', ''will you'', and their various inflections when used as a marker for
tag questions) for example. Moreover, both and are frequently used as
additional particles for conveying nuanced meaning where, in English, no such particle exists. Straightforward, non-idiomatic, translations from German to English and then back to German can often result in the loss of all of the modal particles such as and from a text.
Translation from languages that have word systems to those that do not, such as Latin, is similarly problematic. As Calvert says, "Saying yes or no takes a little thought in Latin".
Colloquial forms
Non-verbal
Linguist
James R. Hurford notes that in many
English dialects "there are colloquial equivalents of ''Yes'' and ''No'' made with
nasal sound
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internatio ...
s interrupted by a voiceless, breathy ''h''-like interval (for Yes) or by a
glottal stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
(for No)" and that these
interjections are transcribed into writing as ' or '.
These forms are particularly useful for speakers who are at a given time unable to articulate the actual words ''yes'' and ''no''.
[ The use of short vocalizations like ''uh-huh'', ''mm-hmm'', and ''yeah'' are examples of non-verbal communication, and in particular the practice of backchanneling.
Art historian Robert Farris Thompson has posited that ''mm-hmm'' may be a ]loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because ...
from a West African language that entered the English vernacular from the speech of enslaved Africans; linguist Lev Michael, however, says that this proposed origin is implausible, and linguist Roslyn Burns states that the origin of the term is difficult to confirm.
''Aye'' and variants
The word ''aye'' () as a synonym for ''yes'' in response to a question dates to the 1570s. According to the '' Online Etymology Dictionary'', it is of unknown origin. It may derive from the word ''I'' (in the context of "I assent"); as an alteration of the Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old Englis ...
("yes"); or the adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
''aye'' (meaning always "always, ever"), which comes from the Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...
. Using ''aye'' to mean ''yes'' is archaic, having disappeared from most of the English-speaking world, but is notably still used by people from Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to ...
, Ulster, and the north of England.["Yes (adverb)" in ''Oxford Thesaurus of English'' (3d ed.: Oxford University Press, 2009 (ed. Maurice Waite), p. 986.]
In December 1993, a witness in a Scottish court who had answered "aye" to confirm he was the person summoned was told by a sheriff judge that he must answer either ''yes'' or ''no''. When his name was read again and he was asked to confirm it, he answered "aye" again, and was imprisoned for 90 minutes for contempt of court. On his release he said, "I genuinely thought I was answering him."
''Aye'' is also a common word in parliamentary procedure
Parliamentary procedure is the accepted rules, ethics, and customs governing meetings of an assembly or organization. Its object is to allow orderly deliberation upon questions of interest to the organization and thus to arrive at the sense ...
, where the phrase ''the ayes have it'' means that a motion has passed. In the House of Commons of the British Parliament, MPs vote orally by saying "aye" or "no" to indicate they approve or disapprove of the measure or piece of legislation. (In the House of Lords
The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by appointment, heredity or official function. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminst ...
, by contrast, members say "content" or "not content" when voting).
The term has also historically been used in nautical usage, often phrased as "aye, aye, sir" duplicating the word "aye". Fowler's '' Dictionary of Modern English Usage'' (1926) explained that the nautical phrase was at that time usually written ''ay, ay, sir''.[
The informal, affirmative phrase ''why-aye'' (also rendered ''whey-aye'' or ''way-eye'') is used in the dialect of ]northeast England
North East England is one of nine official regions of England at the first level of ITL for statistical purposes. The region has three current administrative levels below the region level in the region; combined authority, unitary authority ...
,[''Perspectives on Northern Englishes'' (eds. Sylvie Hancil & Joan C. Beal: ]Walter de Gruyter
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature.
History
The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...
: 2017), table 4.2: "North-east features represented in the LL Corpus."[Emilia Di Martino, ''Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction: Analyzing Geordie Stylizations'' (Routledge, 2019).] most notably by Geordies.[
]
Other
Other variants of "yes" include ''acha'' in informal Indian English and historically ''righto'' or ''righty-ho'' in upper-class British English
British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadl ...
, although these fell out of use during the early 20th century.[
]
See also
* Affirmation and negation
* Thumb signal
*Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...
*Untranslatability
Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a ''lacuna'', or lexical gap. The term arises when desc ...
References
Further reading
* —Jones' analysis of how to answer questions with "yes" or "no" in the Welsh language, broken down into a typology of echo and non-echo responsives, polarity and truth-value responses, and numbers of forms
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Pdf.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yes And No
English grammar
English words
History of the English language
Parts of speech
br:Sí
de:Ja
es:Sí
es:No
eo:Jes
it:Sì
ja:はい
no:Ja
sk:Áno
yi:יא