Unsurprisingly, it's similar in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. Mandarin and Cantonese (and probably other Sinitic languages) don't either, with much the same arrangement as the Celtic languages.
There are many yes-like words, but not exactly "yes". There's "it is", "it's correct", and "it's good" that may be used depending on context to mean yes.
Amazing! I wonder about the universality of head nods (for yes) and head shakes (for no), and whether languages that lack a "yes" or "no" might still use nods.
> There are several exceptions: in Greece, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria,[2] Albania, and Sicily a single nod of the head up (not down) indicates a "no".
Though for Bulgaria at least it seems it's shifting with many people who lived abroad at some point(myself included) and have picked up the correct/more universal form. Which makes it worse: Now no one really knows whether you mean yes or no...
There's also the head bobble, common in south India, which looks a lot like an ongoing head shake but generally means something like ongoing agreement.
Referring to it as "ongoing agreement" reminds me of something I think of as the "confessional no." When addicts talk about their addiction, there's often a rhythmic shaking of the head from side to side like a continual "no," but that speeds up and slows down with some relationship to the grammar of the sentences used.
You can probably make yourself do it by saying out loud: "When I was young, I thought I understood everything." It's like an ongoing disagreement.
What's being argued here is like saying "french" and "francais" are completely unrelated words because they sound different, despite being somewhat similar in sound and having a clear shared origin and meaning.
You can go pretty much anywhere on earth and say "huh? uh? ummm?" in response to something that you don't understand and people will get that you don't understand. Say another word, like "Great", and they might not know that you're affirming whatever they said.
And "yes" doesn't exist in all languages. Many languages require the speaker to repeat back part of the statement or the verb to affirm something.
Different languages have different ways of recording/formalizing what are fundamentally the same onomatopoeic inspirations, though.
In English, frogs croak; in Japanese, they kerokero. It’s clear that the same sound is being portrayed there, just broken up differently due to English having an alphabet where Japanese has an abugida.
Neither language’s encoding from the source “sound of a frog croaking” to a word is lossless, because humans can’t make that exact sound with their vocal cords; and so none of our systems of talking about sounds, be they written languages, spoken languages, or formalisms like IPA, can contain a good representation of the required movements. But both languages above get close enough that we can recognize the sound being referred to from its per-language encoding when we hear it spoken, and from there, know what the word is, even without speaking the relevant language.
The idea here is that there is a thing humans can communicate by making the sound of their language’s equivalent word for “huh?”, which speakers of all other human languages can equally recognize as having the same meaning as their own language’s word “huh?”, without understanding anything about the language being spoken. That communicability is what effectively makes the words “the same” word.
It’s not really that the word (written symbol; exact spoken phonemes) for “huh?” is the same between languages. It’s the abstract sound pattern that’s the same. Just like a frog’s croak, as an abstract sound pattern, is the same as any other frog’s croak, and unlike anything that’s not a frog’s croak. The difference is that all humans can make a “huh?” noise; and so we do get perfect mutual intelligibility out of it. We don’t manage to represent the “sound that ‘huh?’ makes” well in human languages; but when we say it, we still say it the “right” (mutually-intelligible) way nevertheless.
From Middle English ye, ȝea, ya, ȝa, from Old English ġēa, iā (“yea, yes”), from Proto-Germanic ja (“yes, thus, so”), from Proto-Indo-European yē (“already”)
Wiktionary about yes says
From Middle English yes, yis, from Old English ġēse, ġīse, ġȳse, ġīese (“yes, of course, so be it”), equivalent to ġēa (“yes", "so”) + sī(e) (“may it be”), from Proto-Indo-European yē (“already”). Compare yea.
So "yes", seeming so simple, was once a compound word.
Latin had a few ways to affirm or negate. Both "ita" (it is) and the more forceful "ita vero" (it is true) could be used for yes, but you could also repeat the verb from the question with modification to affirm. "Have you eaten?" -> "I have eaten."
For negation you could do the same verb-repeating, but add "non" to negate.
The argument is that the word for "huh" in all languages can be traced to some common ancestor language. "eh" and "huh" are very similar phonetically, and could readily evolve from one to the other or from some common ancestor that's neither).
>They recorded bits of informal conversation from 31 dialects across 5 continents and suggested that the word ‘huh’ (and its variants) is possibly a universal repair initiator that exists in all languages, performs the same function and sounds roughly the same across languages.
It is apparent that they were aware that it isn't pronounced the same in all languages (because of course it isn't), but that it's a possible universal repair initiator that sounds similar. The title of the article is linkbait, I agree, but the article explains better.
But isn’t this the case for more than just “huh” ? For example, expressing pain (eg “ouch”) exists in all languages as well, although they all have to be translated as well.
Yes, and the article addresses this. It says that pain sounds are closer to grunts on the word-grunt spectrum, and they argue that “huh” is more word-like ok that spectrum.
