ShibbOleth’s thread (Colloquial French Question) reminded me of a question I was meaning to ask: why does French have two ways to say “yes”?
There’s “oui”, which is used almost all of the time.
There’s also “si”, which is used to respond affirmatively to a negative question.
To illustrate: if you’re asked a question like: “have you been here before?” and you have, the response would be “oui.”
But if you’re asked: “you’ve not been here before, have you?” the response is “si”.
I’m just curious why there are the two different responses, based solely on the way the question is phrased. Also, do other romance languages have this pattern?
Chinese doesn’t have a single word to indicate “yes”. Instead, it depends on the situation.
If somebody asks you in Chinese, “have you been there?” (you mei you qu guo neige difang ?), you’d answer “have” (you).
If somebody asks, “Are you a foreigner?” (Ni shi waiguoren ma?), you’d answer “am” (shi).
If somebody asks, “Does it ‘feel’ cold outside?” (Waimian hui leng ma?), you’d answer “feels” (hui).
If somebody asks, “Have [you] eaten ([your] fill)?” (chi bao le ma?), you’d answer “eaten [my] fill” (chi bao le). (A common greeting/response when you first see an acquaintance that day.)
And 10,000 other variations.
ETA: The nearest approximation to “yes” would translate more or less as “correct” (dui), but it isn’t really used the same way as our all-purpose “yes”.
In Polish, “tak” means yes. But if the person you’re speaking with agrees with what you’re saying, or just wants to acknowledge they’re listening, they may say “no” repeatedly while you’re speaking.
The problem is, in English you have to add the explanation to make your meaning clear. In German, you can just say, “Doch,” and it is quite clear that you mean to contradict the premise of the question. In English, if you respond to the above question by simply saying, “Yes,” the answer is (to my ear) ambiguous. It would be nice if English had a word that served this particular function.
A question like “Why does language A have a given grammatical, vocabulary, or phonological form?” is generally impossible to answer. All languages have idiosyncratic grammatical forms which aren’t found in most other languages. Sometimes they have grammatical forms that aren’t found in any other language. The forms which yes/no answers take in the languages of the world are one example of this. I don’t know if anyone has done a survey of the world’s languages, but it might in fact be less typical for a language to have only one word for yes and one word for no in the way that English does. A language is structured the way it is, and there’s no deep reason for it.
Arabic has ‘aiwa’ and ‘naam’ which both mean ‘yes’ but I’m not sure if there is any difference in nuance, or whether one is colloquial and the other is classical.
Spanish doesn’t have an equivalent of the French “si,” which actually leads to some very confusing responses.
“Have you been here?” Sí. (Yes I have)
“You hadn’t been here before, right?” No, sí. Eeeeh, digo, ¡que sí que había estado! (No, yes. Eeeeh, I mean, yes I had been!)
If someone asks the second question and the answer is yes, people often have to reask “yes you had not been here or yes you had been here?”
