Just thought of something else: the regionalism may explain why “si” is not used in Quebec. Since “si” became the general affirmative in both Italy and Spain, could it be that it entered French from southern France? if so, since most of the forebears of québécois and acadians came from Normandy, it may be that “si” was not commonly used in the northern part of France, so wasn’t carried across the Atlantic?
Thanks for all your comments, everyone. Most informative.
It’s possible that the “oui/si” distinction in French arose from borrowing from Spanish or Italian, or it may be that it came from different dialects within French. It’s also possible that there were always two (or more) words for “yes” in French, and at some point the use of these two words split and “oui” began to only be used in positive contexts and “si” only in negative contexts. I answered the OP the way I did because you didn’t ask at what point in history this distinction arose. You asked why French has this distinction. It’s possible to answer questions about the history of a language if one has enough data about previous periods of the question. I was assuming that you wanted some deeper answer to the question because you also asked if other languages have this distinction. As has been made clear by the answers in this thread, English is actually in the distinct minority in that it has exactly one usual word for “yes” and exactly one usual word for “no.” Other languages often have more than one word for each of them. Still other languages have no word for “yes” or “no.” One indicates “yes” or “no” by repeating the verb of the question, using a “not” if the answer is “no.” I apologize for not answering the question in the way you wanted, but it makes a difference when you ask “Where did this distinction arise?” as opposed to “Why does this distinction exist?”.
I think the fact that the OP asked specifically about other romance languages fitting this pattern was a sufficient clue.
And even if the broader question stands of “why is it this way”, I for one still find it an interesting discussion from e.g., the standpoint of cognitive semantics. No need to shut it down by throwing up our hands and exclaiming, “who knows!?”
When I took Latin in high school they taught us to say “ita vero” (“truly so”) for “yes”, and “minime” for no.
In Classical Arabic, na‘am corresponds to oui, while balá corresponds to si.
I think the etymology of aywa is from a contraction of the phrase ay wallāh ‘yes, by God!’
Although there are words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in Irish we were always thought in school to answer using the verb from the question.
Koxinga writes:
> I think the fact that the OP asked specifically about other romance languages
> fitting this pattern was a sufficient clue.
And I think the fact that he asked “Why do they do this?” and not “Where does it come from?” made it look like he was asking about some deep reason for it, not just the historical origin.
> And even if the broader question stands of “why is it this way”, I for one still
> find it an interesting discussion from e.g., the standpoint of cognitive semantics.
> No need to shut it down by throwing up our hands and exclaiming, “who
> knows!?”
O.K., answer the question from the viewpoint of cognitive semantics. That’s still not really an answer to the “Why?” question. I’m not sure what you mean by cognitive semantics, but that would only tell us how the various words for “yes” and “no” work in various languages. That wouldn’t tell us why there are different structures for yes/no answers in different languages. What do you mean by cognitive semantics in this context anyway? (I have a master’s degree in linguistics, so you can go into detail.)
In my experience, when someone asks the question, “Why does language X have form Y for the way that they say something?”, what they’re asking is really “Why are the speakers of language X so crazy that they use a different structure than us normal speakers of English?” There’s no answer to a question like that except that languages have the form they do just because they do, and English is just as idiosyncratic in its own ways. Northern Piper was asking a different question that that, but I couldn’t tell that from the OP.
[nitpick] hui is closer to ‘does it/it does’ than ‘feel’. personally i would phrase it as :
If somebody asks, “Is it cold outside?” (Waimian hui **leng **ma?), you’d answer “very cold!” (leng a!).
nope. the chinese way would be to reply “haven’t”, which isn’t ambiguous at all.