Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Affirmatives/reply

Most Indo-European languages use a word that originally meant "so" or "thus" to say yes. Germanic and Latin are both examples of that. In the Romance languages it's clear that there wasn't a single word that was used, and different words are found in different languages (French oui < hoc ille, Occitan òc < hoc, Spanish/Italian si < sic). But in the Slavic languages there is variety too: many use da but Polish and Ukrainian use tak and Czech and Slovak also have their own words. The Celtic languages don't have a single word at all, but repeat the question. So it seems to me that Indo-Europeans didn't have a single way to say "yes", but used a wide variety of phrasings to get the meaning across.

Words for 'no' actually show more variety as well. ne didn't really mean "no" but just "not" and was presumably used as a shorthand, in the same way that we say "I'm not" rather than the full phrase "I'm not going to see my friend". Many languages have later come up with their own words to reinforce the negation, often giving phrases like "not at all" or "not a thing". French in particular has a wide variety of negation words, but the Germanic languages also have several alternatives. English not, Dutch niet and German nicht come from a phrase meaning "not a thing", while English no comes from a phrase meaning "not ever" and Dutch nee(n) was originally "not one" (cognate to English none). In Old Norse meanwhile, something similar to French happened. Extra words were added to normal negative phrases to strengthen the meaning, but those words then came to be treated as negations in their own right.