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Negative N
Posted: 06 July 2005 04:16 PM   [ Ignore ]
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I noticed something when looking at different languages. The "N" sound always seems to show that the word is negative.

Russian: nyet- no
             ya ne paneemayo- I don’tunderstand
French: non- no
            ne…pas, rein, jamais, etc. - negates verb
English: No, not
Italian: no
Spanish: No
Portuguese: não
german: nein


J

I don’t no if that pattern extends out of Indo-European languages. I just thought that was a weird pattern.

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Posted: 06 July 2005 10:33 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 1 ]
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You could add the Scandinavian languages to the n crowd. And it’s all Indo-European. The one remarkable thing about those words is, IMO, that the n is so stable over the years.

There are lots of variations on this theme. There are for example the IE negative prefixes in-, un-, an-, a-, all from a proposed PIE vowel *N-.

It would have been interesting to language psychologists if the n negative had been found in more languages. Unfortunately for them, that seems not to be the case.

In Finnish, no is ei. Chinese has several little words used for no/not, like bu, wu, fei. Swahili yes(!) is ndiyo, no is siyo. The ancient Semitic language Ugaritic had a prefix l- for negating verbs and nouns, corresponding to Arabic la and Bible Hebrew lo. Arabic additionally has the negatives la, ma and lan, and BH has al and other non-n alternatives. A Tamil no is eLlai (different l’s, not a typo (this time)). I regard the l element in Semitic and Dravidian as just a coincidence.

Comparisons are complicated by the fact that several languages have separate words for ‘is not’ or ‘don’t have’, and/or use a separate verb system for negating instead of adding the equivalent of ‘no/not’ etc. Ask in Chinese if somebody has got a book, and the negative answer is ‘not-have’ (meiyou).

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Posted: 06 July 2005 11:18 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 2 ]
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Japanese word for "don’t" is adjectival -nai ~ nu ~ ne.  In traditional school grammar the word share the conjugation paradigm with zu, another nagation particle that was more productive than nai in ancient times.  

Perhaps "nai" and "zu" are the same thing as "go ~ went" and "ferro ~ latum."  How do you call this supplanting conjugations with those from different roots, by the way?

Chinese lagacy for nagative words are hu (bilabial fricative. actually *p > ph > h), mu, hi, mi, respectively meaning "don’t," "don’t have," "non-" and "not yet."

Flam

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Posted: 07 July 2005 01:15 AM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 3 ]
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But colloquial Polish no is actually yes, so beware!  English no is nie in Polish and yes is tak or colloquially no or no tak.

Brazilian dude

P.S. Isn’t Modern Greek no equivalent to yes too?

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