Guide to building natural-seeming languages; "Sim" in Portuguese

[gusl]

Guide to building natural-seeming languages (it's a great linguistics source!)

http://www.zompist.com/kitgram.html#grammar

Portuguese, as far as I know, is the only language where you don't need "yes" to answer affirmatively.

--Você conhece o caminho que vai a São José?
--Conheço. ['I know']
or
--Conheço não. / Não conheço. / Num conheço não. / Conheço nada! (different pragmatic meanings (if there is such a thing)) ['I don't know']

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I believe many ancient languages did without the word "yes" as well. At least, Greek and Latin seemed to most of the time.

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

That's a great page (and there's lots of other cool stuff on zompist.com too). Another, even better, language check-list is the one from Thomas Payne's "Describing Morphosyntax", at XXX . I think I showed you the book when you were in Dublin, in fact - the book is basically a fleshed out version of this page.

[As you can see I didn't manage to find the page - it may not be on the web anymore. bah.]

Irish is another language where you don't answer with "yes" or "no", but just repeat the verbs.

--An tuigeann tu? (Do you understand?)
--Tuigim / Ni thuigim. (I understand / I don't understand)

In fact there are no words for "yes" or "no", unless you want to say sea [SA] "It is [so]", or ni hea [ni:hA]"It is not [so]".

Latin is the same. There are lots of others I'm too tired to think of now :)

s.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure modern Finnish is like that, too. I had a reference grammar of it somewhere...

I totally love the language construction kit, though:

Word order serves the same function in Russian. There you'd say, in effect,

I saw man in rodeo. Man wore horrid plaid suit.

When he's introduced, the man lives near the end of the sentence; when he's old news, he appears at the front.

(Actually, they don't have many rodeos in Russia.)

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Chinese is the same way: questions are answered either by repeating the verb or by saying not ("bu2") and then the verb.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

now that I know some Finnish... :-)

It's probably somewhere between English and Portuguese on this dimension.

- opiskeletko suomea?
- kylla! (rather than "opiskelen!")

OTOH, this seems like a bad example, since the people you'd ask that are likely to have non-standard usage. :-P