Does any language have a word as an answer to a yes/no question that cannot properly be answered with yes or no? mu which is sometimes advanced for that purpose seems not to actually carry this meaning for speakers of Chinese/Japanese.
For example:
“Are recordings of Beethoven’s Twelfth Symphony out of stock?”
“Have you stopped beating your husband?”
I wonder why no language that I know has got such a word, as it would be really useful - more useful than the vast majority of a language’s vocabulary.
(sorry if there has recently been a thread on this - the board’s search function does not allow searches for two-character words.)
Actually it could evolve into a debate. After all, there is no reason why in any complex language you would NEED to answer an ambiguous or “trick” questions with a categorical Yes or No with no possibility of elaboration – except maybe in a courtroom if the presiding judge is a prick who, when you say “Your honor, I CAN’T answer it Yes or No” won’t ask you to explain yourself. “If your answer is anything but X we must conclude that then it must mean Y” is something out of the Stupid Rhetoric Tricks discount bin.
Also, the first example question can be honestly answered “No”. By definition, you do not have something that does not exist or is not possible.
Here’s one answer, from that font of all wisdom, The Jargon File:
mu: /moo/
The correct answer to the classic trick question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”. Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer “yes” is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but “no” is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually “mu”, a Japanese word alleged to mean “Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions”. Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word ‘mu’ is actually from Chinese, meaning ‘nothing’; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also mean “have not” (as in “I have not done it”), or “lack of”, which may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use, which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzai Zen koan:
A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?” Joshu retorted, “Mu!”
Main Entry: pe·ti·tio prin·ci·pii
Pronunciation: p&-'tE-tE-“O-(”)pri[ng]-'ki-pE-"E
Function: noun
Etymology: Medieval Latin, literally, postulation of the beginning, begging the question
: a logical fallacy in which a premise is assumed to be true without warrant or in which what is to be proved is implicitly taken for granted
I don’t think it would be all that useful. How do you answer those questions now? I imagine you point out the false belief and correct it. Wouldn’t you do that regardless?
Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you have to come to the SDMB for a word that with your desired meaning, it’s a pretty good bet it’d never make a good snappy comeback: if you don’t know it, what are the chances your listener will?
(Unless, of course, they deliberately and routinely ask such questions just to annoy you, in which case “thwap” might be a good response. Of course, that’s not so much a word as a sound: a hand, fist or knee striking soft tissue–a flawed response, lexicographically, but remarkably well understood. I don’t usually advocate such -er- “forceful clarity”, but smartass rhetoriticians often don’t respond to any less)
There’s probably some Inuit or Central Aisian or some other place’s agglutinating language that can say “the question is based on incorrect assumptions”. But I would imagine the word would be “qimpâçazhzhöqpeidhbaátfÞr” or something. Not exactly a quick snappy answer word.
I’d say the answer is closer to ‘yes’ than ‘no.’ Okay, if it’s never in stock, then you can’t be out of stock, but OTOH if it doesn’t exist then it’s ALWAYS out of stock. Either is possible, but ‘yes’ is closer to the intended meaning.
That’s seems to me to be a very shortsighted view… sure, right NOW our little one-syllable term wouldn’t really accomplish the goal of establishing the general nature of your reply, but here at the SMDB aren’t we concerned with the long-term betterment of mankind, no matter how long it takes?? If we think that ‘xi’ (to pull a syllable out at random for the purposes of this post) is worthwhile, we can all use it and see if it catches on. :]
And I don’t see that the argument that you’d almost always have to follow ‘xi’ with an explanation of exactly which assumption is false and why is a compelling reason to drop the idea… a lot of times when you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a question you have to add some extra information, after all. But ‘yes’ or ‘no’ serve as a quick way of telegraphing to the other person the general nature of your response.
‘challenge your assumption’ seems much more useful than another ‘one-word alternative’ I remember hearing on some television show… as I recall, the syllable was ‘Po’ or something like that, its origins were somewhere in the indian subcontinent, and the meaning was ‘un-ask the question.’ That’s something you don’t really need very often (except for marriage proposals perhaps.)
The latin languages* have a one-word answer to this to avoid the problems stated earlier.
Consider French: Oui for Yes, Non for No. In exceptional cases where: one wishes to give an answer that negates the main premise of the question and ‘non’ would not convey that, it becomes ‘Si’ for no.
Si is normally used in French for ‘if’
*The ones I know of.
sevastopol I’m only remembering high-school french, but I don’t think “si” is really used as the jargon file uses “mu” .
“Si” is for the more common problem of answering a question phrased in the negative. For example “Isn’t that Cecil Adams wearing the lampshade?”
Answering with a ‘yes’ can be ambiguous (Are you saying that yes, it is Cecil, or yes it is not Cecil?), so “Si” is used to mean “The general statement (without the negation) that you questioned is true” (i.e. “By Jove, it is indeed the world’s smartest human wearing the lampshade!”)
I suppose it’s an interesting little linguistic phenomenon that a ‘no’ answer tends to be more universally understood as applying to the general statement, so there’s no need for a seperate anti-si, whereas there’s more general confusion about whether a ‘yes’ applies to the general statement or the strict form of the question. But that’s not related to the wife-beating questions.