bkhl

joined 2 years ago
[–] bkhl@social.sdfeu.org 2 points 3 days ago

@cgtjsiwy sorry, was a bit simplistic there. Finish is instead an example of a language where while there _is_ a word for "logical" no that's not the usual way to answer yes/no questions.

If we're being pedantic this means it's not similar to Swedish "nej" for most uses of the latter.

[–] bkhl@social.sdfeu.org 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@2xsaiko @TehPers there's other examples too. E.g. Thai has no spaces between words but spaces between phrases/sentences. However the spaces between phrases involve style choices similar to comma in English and many other Latin script writing systems. Also, Thai may have spaces around abbreviations special characters.

I'm quite familiar with Thai so that's close at hand but I guess it's the same in a lot of other writing systems based on Brahmic scripts.

[–] bkhl@social.sdfeu.org 3 points 3 days ago

@TrickDacy @rimu guess I should have mentioned Latin as well, which is a bit interesting. Latin didn't have yes/no, but a lot of modern romance languages does, where things like "si" and "oui" derive from Latin words that had other meanings.

[–] bkhl@social.sdfeu.org 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

@TrickDacy @rimu another example is Irish, which I've heard claim as an explanation for Irish English also contains more of "it is/isn't" and such constructs in favour of yes no.

Another European example is Finnish which has yes but not no. You want me to go on?

[–] bkhl@social.sdfeu.org 6 points 3 days ago (4 children)

@TrickDacy @rimu but use them much more restrictively. As an example in Thai, "yes" is "chai", but is used only in a few situations, like if a question is ended with "chai mai" (yes followed by word forming polar question).

In interfaces you can't usually put this as yes/no buttons, but rather usually one is a verb like "khao" ("come/go in") and the other is the same word prefixed with mai ("not", different tone from the other "mai" i mentioned).

Chinese is similar but I don't know it as well.