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How do you say yes in Latin
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Kerrigan
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Jun 24, 2006, 04:24 PM
 
I've taken years of Latin and I've never been taught this simple word: yes

Instead, I've been told that Romans used phrases like "Ita vero" "sane" "sic" and the like to express agreement.

How could they not have a word for yes??? This has to be wrong.
( Last edited by Kerrigan; Jun 25, 2006 at 08:24 PM. )
     
mduell
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Jun 24, 2006, 04:51 PM
 
etiam
     
khufuu
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Jun 24, 2006, 06:08 PM
 
My dictionary says: ita, immo, sane
     
medicineman
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Jun 24, 2006, 06:35 PM
 
Originally Posted by Kerrigan
I've taken years of Latin and I've never been taught this simple word: yes

Instead, I've been told that Romans used phrases like "Ita vero" "sane" "sic" and the like to express agreement.

How could they not have a word for yes??? This has to be wrong.

OH NO WRONG FORUM MOD ALERT MOVE THIS QUICK TO LOUNGE
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spauldingg
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Jun 24, 2006, 07:01 PM
 
Just guessing having absolutely no latin, just going on human nature. Maybe it was contextual. Are there latin phrases for "I agree" or just "agree" if discussing politics or a business plan? Senator Trivialitus asks Senator Porkprojectix, "We should tax certain citizens for faster aqueduct delivery if they bathe faster than others."

Senator Porkprojectix doesn't say "yes", he says, "I agree with you, that should be voted on in a secret session."

But at home the wife asks "would you like some wine with your ostrich flank and boar tongue tenders dipped in honey?" Instead of "yes" he might say: "Wine would be good with my ostrich flank and boar tongue tenders."

So. Did I read too much Asterix and Obelisk as a kid, or what?
( Last edited by spauldingg; Jun 24, 2006 at 07:11 PM. )
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Millennium
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Jun 24, 2006, 07:47 PM
 
I asked my wife -a Latin teacher- this one. Response...
Actually, there is no single word for "yes." Nor is there a single word for "no," actually.
Words such as "sane" and "ita vero" and "sic" and such are used to express agreement. "Minime" and similar words are used to express disagreement.
For a yes/no question, the Romans usually began with either "Nonne" or "num," depending on the expected answer (I love this piece of the language - "nonne" expects a yes answer, "num" expects a no answer), or often just put the ending "-ne" on the end of the verb, to make it a yes/no question. Thus, in a template example, they would either say, "Does he verb?" or "He verbs, doesn't he?" or "He doesn't verb, does he?" and the response would be either "he verbs" or "he doesn't verb." Not just a simple yes or no.
This was probably a much more complicated answer than you wanted. But this is what happens when a nutcase of a high school Latin teacher gets a hold of a cool question like this.
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spauldingg
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Jun 24, 2006, 07:53 PM
 
Wow, I was close to right. I'm such a fart smeller.
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Chuckit
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Jun 24, 2006, 07:54 PM
 
Chinese is somewhat similar to this, from my understanding.
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Ganesha
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Jun 24, 2006, 08:25 PM
 
不是
     
Chuckit
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Jun 24, 2006, 09:05 PM
 
笑 (or whatever they do for "LOL" in Chinatalk)
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Jun 25, 2006, 02:13 AM
 


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DeathToWindows
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Jun 25, 2006, 07:21 AM
 
Ok, Millennium beat me to it - but I've got four semesters of latin and there isn't really one clean way to say yes or no...

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Obi Wan's Ghost
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Jun 25, 2006, 08:29 AM
 
Originally Posted by Chuckit
Chinese is somewhat similar to this, from my understanding.
Which Chinese? So many dialects. In Cantonese yes is yao. No is mo.


Use of terms like thanks, yes, no, please etc have not been around for as long as we think. They are economised shortened terms used by major civilisations to get things said and done quickly. Some tribal languages still don't have a way of saying them.
     
Kerrigan  (op)
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Jun 25, 2006, 12:13 PM
 
Millenium, tell Mrs. Millenium I appreciate her answer.

I'm always impressed with people who have a solid understanding of Latin because frankly it's a confusing language.

So I assume that in later years, 'sic' (in this way, just so, yes: Cassell Lat. Dic.) must have become the most common way of expressing agreement, which would explain why 'si' means yes both in Spanish and French (Oxford Fr. Dic.) and maybe some other romance languages.
     
Oisín
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Jun 25, 2006, 12:52 PM
 
Hah! You didn’t really think you could keep this thread from me, did you? If you’re not really interested in this stuff, I suggest skipping this post—knowing me, it’s probably going to be horribly long and boring



Originally Posted by Millennium’s wife
For a yes/no question, the Romans usually began with either "Nonne" or "num," depending on the expected answer (I love this piece of the language - "nonne" expects a yes answer, "num" expects a no answer), or often just put the ending "-ne" on the end of the verb, to make it a yes/no question. Thus, in a template example, they would either say, "Does he verb?" or "He verbs, doesn't he?" or "He doesn't verb, does he?" and the response would be either "he verbs" or "he doesn't verb." Not just a simple yes or no.
While it’s true that Latin didn’t have one single word for yes/no, even in Classical times, nōn could very well be used on its own, without appending a verb, to reply in the negative. Sic also soon became the ‘standard’ to use on its own when replying in the positive (cf. the words for yes and no in the modern Romance languages; Fr. si/non [si used only to reply to negative questions], Sp. /no, Pt. sim/não, It. si/non). Edit: Good guess, Kerrigan

The original negator in Latin (directly inherited) was ne. As in English, appending the negator to the end of a sentence makes the sentence a question: nōuō eboracō vēnīs ne?, “You’re from New York, no?”. Unlike in English, though, there was no expectations as to whether the reply would be positive or negative.

In its use of negating verbs, however, ne soon fell out of grace, in favour of nōn (from ne ūnum, “not one”, the same provenance as ‘no’ [determinative] and ‘none’ in English), and ne was reinterpreted as a question-marking enclitic. What was, then, more logical than using the question particle on the negator itself? Again, almost the same thing is done in English, in non-reserved questions: the ‘question particle’, broadly speaking, is the rise in the tone of voice. In questions like, “You’re not from New York?” (nōnne nōuō eboracō vēnīs?), the ‘question particle’ is placed (in certain cases, at least) on the negator ‘not’, just as in Latin.

I’m not sure what num comes from, though I’m sure there’s a relatively similar explanation for it. (If anyone happens to know its etymology, please do tell )

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost
Which Chinese? So many dialects. In Cantonese yes is yao. No is mo.
This particular thing doesn't differ much within the Chinese regionalects, actually.

There is no direct word for ‘yes’, though there is (in most regionalects) a word for ‘no’ (usually the same word as the general verbal negator). Even this generic ‘no’, however, is not as omniapplicable (which I believe is not actually a word) as its English counterpart.

The two words you used from Cantonese are the characters 有 and 没有, respectively, which are both also used as affirmatives and negatives in Mandarin Chinese. They are used to reply only to questions in which the main verb is 有 (‘to have’ or ‘there is’), in other words possessive and existential questions, mainly (also, especially in southern regionalects, questions regarding completed actions, a feature that has found its way into Chinese from English, actually!).

(没)有 is probably the second-commonest pair of replies; the most common pair is probably (不)是, the one quoted by Ganesha above. The verb in this pair is 是, ‘to be’. The reason this is the most common pair is that Chinese has a propensity for turning sentences (both interrogative and statement ones) into copular phrases with the original clause nominalised as the subject predicative; i.e., instead of saying, “I like cats” (我喜欢猫), you can (for a variety of grammatical, stylistic, or many other reasons) say something that is perhaps loosely translable as, “I am a like cat-one” (我是喜欢猫的). In these phrases, the main verb goes from being the original verb (“like”) to being the copula (“am”), and a reply to a question formed in this manner then uses the copula as the verb.

If, however, you phrase your question directly (“Do you like cats?”–你喜欢猫吗?), the reply has to use the original verb (“[don’t] like”), and the reply would be (不)喜欢.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, 不 is the word used to negate verbs, and it’s also the word used as a standalone negator; the question of whether one likes cats can also be answered in the negative simply by saying 不. (There’s a stylistic difference, with 不 used without a verb being more impatient, rude, cross, abrupt, blunt, etc., but that’s of secondary importance)

As I said above, though, even the standalone negator cannot be used to answer all questions—if, as the first paragraph above, the verb in the sentence is 有, then it doesn’t work, because the word used to negate that particular word is (for historical reasons) not 不, but 没 (or 未 in certain cases/dialects/ages). Unlike 不, though, 没 cannot be used on its own, but requires the verb 有, yielding 没有, as above.

(Incidentally, since it was mentioned above, as Latin, Chinese also distinguishes between questions expecting a positive answer and questions not expecting either a positive or a negative answer in particular. In fact, it distinguishes between questions where a positive answer is sort of hinted at, but not really expected, and questions where anything but a positive answer would be outright ludicrous, to exaggerate the differences a little. They don’t, however, have a special way of forming questions expecting a negative answer: they just simply negate the question in the same way as English [and Latin] does.)

Use of terms like thanks, yes, no, please etc have not been around for as long as we think. They are economised shortened terms used by major civilisations to get things said and done quickly. Some tribal languages still don't have a way of saying them.
They’re neither more archaic/primitive nor more modern/advanced than any other ways of expressing (dis)agreement. Many very old languages have/had them (such as the mater lingua of English, Proto-Indo-European, which ceased to be a linguistic unity at least 5,000 years ago); conversely, many modern languages don’t have them, such as the Chinese and Gaelic languages, for instance. In the Gaelic languages, it’s even more complex than in Chinese—since Chinese doesn’t conjugate verbs (at all), you don’t have to worry about subjects, tenses, aspects, moods, or anything else when replying; just repeat the verb itself. In Gaelic, however, not only do you have to match the tense of the verb to the original question; you also have to match the subject of the verb to the one in the original question, but seen from your own point of view, and also in which tenses and persons the subject has to be said, and in which it doesn’t. Of course, you also have to remember to undo any initial mutations caused by preceding interrogative particles in the question, and then mutate the verb according to the rules that go for statement main clauses in your reply.

Examples (verbs with subjects bolded):
—“An dtabharfá cupán tae?” [“Would you [sg.] like a cup of tea?”]
—“Thabharfainn, go raibh maith agat.” [“Yes, please.”]

—“An bhfuil sibh ag imeacht anois?” [“Are you [pl.] leaving now?”]
—“.” [“Yes”]



Hm. I see I’ve lived up to my disclaimer at the beginning of this post. If you’ve read all this blither-blather, then... here, have a cookie for pure stamina.
     
christ
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Jun 25, 2006, 04:00 PM
 
Why on earth does it matter how Romans said 'yes' or 'no' - you are hardly likely to meet one, and 'yes' isn't a good answer to an essay question.
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willed
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Jun 25, 2006, 04:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by christ
Why on earth does it matter how Romans said 'yes' or 'no' - you are hardly likely to meet one, and 'yes' isn't a good answer to an essay question.
My old Latin teacher was once sitting next to a stranger on a plane; they were unable to find a language in which they could converse, until they got to Latin.

Strange but, apparently, true.

...or maybe he just made that up to try and convince us there was some point to learning the language, but I prefer to believe him
     
Millennium
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Jun 25, 2006, 04:31 PM
 
Originally Posted by Kerrigan
Millenium, tell Mrs. Millenium I appreciate her answer.
So I assume that in later years, 'sic' (in this way, just so, yes: Cassell Lat. Dic.) must have become the most common way of expressing agreement, which would explain why 'si' means yes both in Spanish and French (Oxford Fr. Dic.) and maybe some other romance languages.
According to my wife, that's correct. She's not certain, but the French oui may have come from the Latin vero in much the same way.
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Oisín
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Jun 25, 2006, 04:50 PM
 
You can tell your wife that that latter supposition of hers is not quite true (quite far from it, actually):

Oui comes from Old French oïl, which again comes from pre-French and Vulgar Latin versions of what is ultimately Classical Latin hoc ille (“that which he [said]”).

There are two major dialectical groups in France: one (the northern) comprises Standard French and a lot of fairly similar dialects; the other (the southern) comprises such dialects as Provençal and Occitan (generally a bit more conservative in morphology, and closer to Català). The two are regularly known as Langue d’Oc and Langue d’Oïl in French, from their differing ways of saying “yes”. In Langue d’Oïl, one said hoc ille (as described above), while in Langue d’Oc, one said only hoc.
     
Millennium
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Jun 25, 2006, 08:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by Oisín
You can tell your wife that that latter supposition of hers is not quite true (quite far from it, actually):

Oui comes from Old French oïl, which again comes from pre-French and Vulgar Latin versions of what is ultimately Classical Latin hoc ille (“that which he [said]”).

There are two major dialectical groups in France: one (the northern) comprises Standard French and a lot of fairly similar dialects; the other (the southern) comprises such dialects as Provençal and Occitan (generally a bit more conservative in morphology, and closer to Català). The two are regularly known as Langue d’Oc and Langue d’Oïl in French, from their differing ways of saying “yes”. In Langue d’Oïl, one said hoc ille (as described above), while in Langue d’Oc, one said only hoc.
She says thank you very much; she didn't know that.
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Oct 15, 2012, 05:55 AM
 
Ita Vero with macrons over the e and o in veto, it is a plain yes.
     
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Oct 15, 2012, 11:22 AM
 
Whats ZOMBIE in Latin?
     
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