Question + answer

Yes and no are such common words of English that it comes as a surprise to learn that approximately half the languages in the world have no such words.

Such languages (which include the Celtic languages, Japanese and Chinese) provide answers not by using special words, but by echoing the question.

So if someone asks you, Are you coming to the movies?, you might answer, Coming.

And if someone asks, Did you see Titanic?, you might answer, Not see.

Positive questions (like Can you see the car?) are relatively easy to cope with on a world scale. Negative questions (like Can’t you see the car?) are much harder. To start with, there is the problem of how to answer a negative question if you only have two choices.

If someone asks, Can’t you see the car? in English, and you answer, Yes, you probably (but not invariably) mean that you can see the car.

If you got the same question in Japanese, and you answered with a word which usually translates as ‘yes’, you would be interpreted as saying ‘Yes, I agree with the proposition in the question, namely that I cannot see the car’.

While either might be entirely logical, meeting one if you are used to the other can lead to serious misunderstandings.

Some languages (including French, German, Swedish) have a special yesword for answering negative questions.

In Danish, for instance, if you are asked Can you see the car? and you can, you answer Ja, which means ‘Yes, I can see the car’.

But if you are asked Can’t you see the car?, and you can see the car, you answer, Jo, which means ‘Yes, despite the implications of the question, I can see the car’. The word Nej (‘no’) will mean that you cannot see the car in response to either question.

Other languages have a four-way system. Interestingly, English was one such language in pre-Shakespearean times. The four terms were yes, yea, no and nay. Yes and no were answers to negative questions: Can’t you come? Yes! (that is, I can come); Can’t you come? No! (that is, I can’t come); Can you come? Yea! (that is, I can come); Can you come? Nay! (that is, I can’t come).

Shakespeare knew all four words but had lost the system; writers not long after his time thought the whole thing was unnecessary and silly. Note that it is the answers to negative questions which have persisted.

Romanian is another language that has a four-way system, which works in much the same way as the now-obsolete English system.

Other systems are possible, too. In the English House of Lords, members vote

Content if they are in favour of a motion and Not content if they are not. In more colloquial English, we can say Right or

Fine if we are in favour of something. One way of showing agreement in Latin was to say Placet – ‘‘it pleases’’.

The origin of the word Yes is not clear but may arise from a phrase meaning something like ‘So be it’.

The origin of the alternative aye, now used mainly in northern Britain as showing agreement, but used at sea and in voting in some parliaments including New Zealand’s, is equally obscure, and also remarkably modern, arising in the 16th century.

And however much you might hate

Yeah no, it is not a contradiction. Its meaning varies quite a lot, but in some uses the yeah is an acknowledgement of what has been said, while the no shows disagreement, often mitigated disagreement.

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