Starting from ‘No’

A word that’s powerful, useful, understood by everyone… Even babies.

To kick off our guided tour of 40 world languages, as they say, “a simple yes or no will suffice.” Or more precisely, a simple ‘No’ (don’t worry, ‘Yes’ will follow soon behind.)

Why start here? First: Because you have to start somewhere. As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (or at least, someone by the same name) wrote in the Tao Te Ching¹, Chapter 64:

(Qiān lǐ zhī xíng, shǐ yú zú xià)

which means “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”; or perhaps (because word meanings are flexible—a topic we’ll return to frequently), “A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet.” In any case: Whether you prefer to think of ‘yes’/‘no’ as a first step along the road to communication… or whether you picture ‘No!’ as emphatically stamped beneath the feet of a tantrum-throwing two-year-old… it works just fine either way.

Second: “Yes” and “No” are the only two words that define their own entire category of questions. If you could communicate with any other person in the world using only two words—wouldn’t you choose these: affirmation or negation? To agree or to disagree? And further, these two concepts carry far more potential shades of meaning than just the duality of positive/negative, factual or false. “Yes!” is an exultation, an expression of triumph, satisfaction, pleasure, relief; “No!” can be a command, a lament, a cry of frustration or incredulity.

Let’s actually start with NO because—face it—it’s the more fun of the two, not to mention developmentally easier to grasp. In fact, most children learn how to both recognize and express ‘no’ earlier than ‘yes’—both as a concept and as a word. A typical infant gains the ability to comprehend ‘no’ between 7 to 9 months of age, even learning to express it with a shake of their head, while ‘yes’ may follow up to several months later. Those of us who speak English or another Indo-European language as their native tongue (which is likely most of you reading this) will feel that it’s natural… inevitable perhaps?… for this word to begin with an ‘N’ sound – that something primally, gutturally Negative links this letter to the idea of negation: Look in the mirror as you say “Nnn” and you will see gritted, clenched teeth. This might seem to be borne out by the fact that the word for “no” in nearly every Indo-European language does begin with the same sound. In English and German we say ‘no’ and ‘nein’; the more theatrical English variant ‘nay’ mirrors the Dutch ‘nee’ and Swedish ‘nej’—which may be spelled differently but pronounced exactly the same. The various Romance languages employ the similar ‘no’, ‘non’, ‘não’, and ‘nu’; the Slavic sub-family of languages say ‘ni’, ‘nie’, ‘nyet’. (Though they employ different alphabets in doing so: Russian and Ukrainian use variants of the Cyrillic alphabet, and thus the man in the Soviet propaganda poster shown above is not saying ‘Het!’ to alcohol—but ‘Nyet!’ Whether it’s realistic he would say such a thing is a question for a different blog.)

Moving to other, thinner branches of the Indo-European family tree, Lithuanians and Latvians (the Baltic language group) say ‘ne’ while Celtic-language speakers in Ireland say ‘níl’ and in Wales, ‘nann’. And moving beyond the borders of Europe, the Indo-Iranian branch of languages seem to continue this strain of negativistic nattering: Persian (also known by its own speakers as Farsi) says ‘nah’, as does its cousin language Kurdish, while speakers of Hindi and Urdu (in many respects the same language, though written in different scripts) say ‘nahin’. Similarly other languages of North India, for example Punjabi, Gujarati, and Bengali, negate with ‘nā’, ‘nā’, and ‘nahīṁ’, respectively. Even Hungarian, which belongs to a completely unrelated language family and (despite being from Europe) is non-Indo-European, uses the word ‘nem’. All of which would seem to support the suspicion that maybe there’s something intrinsically, well, negative about this very letter-sound…

Except there isn’t. With very few exceptions, human languages are not onomatopoeic—there’s no built-in correspondence of certain language sounds with those of the things or ideas that they describe (the exceptions being, for instance, on the order of ‘meow’ to describe the sound made by a cat; I’m aware of no language in which a cat begs for dinner by saying ‘chved’.)² If we continue down the list with ‘NO’, we soon see there are exceptions even within ‘our’ family of Indo-European languages. While Latin—the direct ancestor language of the Romance group, and a strong linguistic influence on all other Western languages—uses the familiar word ‘no’, Greek—the other great language of Western antiquity, and an equally strong influence on other European vocabularies—instead says ‘ochi’. (Not rhyming with ‘mochi’; rather it’s the guttural, clearing-your-throat kind of ‘ch’ sound, often described as ‘like Scottish loch’. One could equally well spell it ‘okhi’.) In fact, none of the negation words in Greek begin with the ‘N’ sound at all: ‘then’ (not), ‘kaneís’ (nobody), ‘poté’ (never), even ‘arnitikós’ (negative). What gives?

The Basque language, famously an isolate with Europe (that is, not related to any other known language or linguistic family on the continent, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world) also breaks with the ‘N’ rule: Basques say ‘ez’ for ‘no’. And as we move further out of Europe—as well as away from the familiar Indo-European language family—we realize that negating with ‘N’ is actually more the exception than the rule. Turkey, an EU member state but technically 97% in Asia, speaks a language belonging to the Turkic family; here ‘hayır’ means ‘no’ (please don’t mind the missing dot over the ‘i’—it’s absent on purpose.) In Turkey’s geographically neighboring languages Arabic and Hebrew—both belonging to the Afro-Asiatic branch of the Semitic language family—the terms for ‘no’ are ‘la’ and ‘lo’, respectively. Not to mention that both are famously written and read from right to left:

And while the northern half of the Indian subcontinent belongs to the Indo-European language club, or in this case the ‘N’ for NO! club, the southern half speaks primarily languages of the entirely distinct Dravidian family, represented in our list by Tamil, which says ‘illai’. (Its neighboring Dravidian languages Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada—the language, not the country—likewise have similar N-free words for ‘no’.) The writing systems of North and South India are equally distinct and varied (not to mention super cool-looking), though they share the common feature of being considered ‘alphasyllabaries’ rather than ‘alphabets’. (More on that in future posts.)

The continent of Africa, original homeland and cradle of the human species, naturally also contains a broad variety of languages—but in number of speakers is dominated primarily by members of two language families, the first being the Afro-Asiatic (including Arabic and Hebrew as mentioned, along with Somali and Amharic, the chief language of Ethiopia); and the second being the Niger-Congo family, accounting for the largest number of speakers south of the Sahara Desert (and by some counts, the largest family in the world by number of languages). In Yoruba, ‘no’ is ‘rara’, while in two prominent members of the Bantu language sub-family, Swahili speakers say ‘hapana’ and Zulu speakers ‘cha’. Searching through a dozen more African languages, I could find only one (Tswana, spoken in Botswana) that was eligible for the ‘N’ for No club with ‘nnyaa’—sounding like a negative and a taunt at the same time—meaning it was all but certainly coincidental. It does strike me that the Swahili word ‘hapana’ is so unusually long, at three syllables; it gives me sympathy for all the unlucky toddlers in Kenya or Tanzania who have just figured out how to speak up against their parents, but have to work three times as hard as their Dutch or Egyptian counterparts to do so.

Moving to East Asia, we encounter a smaller number of total languages than Africa, but these are split between very distinct families. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese each belong to different and unique language families and are either the dominant, or only, languages surviving in their respective categories. As the language of the oldest East Asian civilization, Chinese occupies a position somewhat like Latin—it has exerted historical and cultural influence over its neighboring countries for millennia—yet for the most basic concepts, those closest to home, each language has guarded its own native vocabulary. So it is with ‘no’. The Chinese word ‘bù’—the back-slanting mark is not an accent, but rather a ‘tone marker’ indicating that tone of voice starts high and falls as the syllable is being said—is also represented as an ideographic character this way:

The etymology of what this represents is (as is true for many Chinese characters)…a complicated story. In brief: it derives from an original pictogram for the calyx of a flower (the part beneath the petals); how this later acquired the meaning of negation, I’m not exactly sure. An alternative interpretation is that it represents a bird flying up toward the limit of the ‘sky’ (horizontal line). While the first explanation sounds more obscure, and thus likely to be true, and the second more like wishful thinking, I prefer a more down-to-earth idea: the character reminds me of a thumbs-down emoji—except symmetrical, as if the middle finger’s the one pointing to the floor. But, heck, maybe that’s just me.

In Japanese, the word ‘no’ is usually ‘iie’ (the two ‘i’s representing a double-long sound, which could also be transcribed as ‘ee-ye’); or alternatively ‘iya’. Any similarity to the stereotypical affirmative of Down East Maine, as in ‘Ayuh, the lobstah’s fresh today’, is coincidental. Unlike in Chinese, these words are written with a syllabic (phonetic) alphabet, rather than ideographic characters:

While Korea for centuries has borne the brunt of being squeezed between two larger and more aggressive neighbors, absorbing in the process some linguistic influences from both, the negatives ‘ani’ and ‘anyo’ remain distinctly Korean. Like English (and for that matter, Ukrainian, Greek or Arabic), Korean is written with a phonetic alphabet—this one purpose-built for the Korean language, reportedly by King Sejong in the 15th century. Korean has distinct letters representing either vowels or consonants, so it’s a true alphabet rather than a syllabary (or alphasyllabary)… but the letters in each syllable are clustered rather than laid out in a straight line. In each of the syllables below, the longest line (whether horizontal or vertical) is part of the vowel, and the circles are ‘silent’:

Don’t be confused by the word for ‘yes’, which can be ‘nae’ in Korean—we’ll get around to that in the next post. Meanwhile, in Vietnamese (like Chinese, a language in which tone can change meaning) ‘no’ is again completely distinct from the other three: ‘không’.

The Austronesian family of languages, of which the majority are considered Malayo-Polynesian languages, comprise a widely scattered group that were spread by ocean-going peoples who started out near the Asian mainland (likely Taiwan) and ventured as far west as Madagascar and as far east as Easter Island (Rapa Nui). Many languages are spoken across the southeast Asian archipelago of Malaysia and Indonesia, but in the dominant Malay language—which is more or less the same as the official language of Indonesia, also called Bahasa Indonesia—the word for ‘no’ is ‘tidak’. Multiple languages are spoken within the Philippine archipelago as well; speakers of Tagalog (or Filipino) negate with ‘hindi’ (not to be confused with the North Indian language). The intrepid peoples who sailed even further from the mainland brought their evolving languages with them—the Māori of New Zealand say ‘kao’ for ‘no’ and Tongans say ‘ ’ikai’, though the Samoan negatives ‘leai’ and Hawaiian ‘ ʻaʻole’ seem quite divergent. Stay tuned; when we get to ‘yes’ and numbers, the Polynesian family members will start to appear more in tune. The bottom line is: Every language changes—it’s just a matter of how, in which direction, and how fast; and words continually mutate, split, fuse and get swapped between languages in surprising and unpredictable ways.

As for the languages indigenous to the New World: I can’t possibly begin to do them justice, so for now I will just note several of them and move on… but not to worry, more on indigenous languages of the Americas in future posts. Starting from the top: The Inuit people of the far north (Canada’s arctic, Greenland, and Alaska) speak related languages over a wide and remote geographic area. In Inuktitut, one of the official tongues of Canada’s Nunavut territory, the word for ‘no’ is ‘aagga’,³ which can be written in two different ways—either Roman letters or Syllabics:

Why the difference between these two? Glad you asked: The latter was developed in the mid-19^th century by missionaries who adapted the syllabic writing first developed for the Cree language to Inuktitut. As in Japanese phonetic script (kana), the symbols may represent consonant + vowel combinations in addition to consonants alone, thus:

In the language of the Navajo (or Diné, which simply means ‘the people’), which is spoken by more people than any other Native language north of Mexico, the word for ‘no’ is ‘ndaga’ or ‘dooda’. In the Nahuatl or Aztec language of Mexico (specifically, Eastern Huasteca) the negative is ‘axtle’. Continuing southward through Central America, in the Yucatec Mayan language (spoken in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala) the negation is ‘ma’ or ‘ma’ ’ (the apostrophe indicating a glottal stop—like a catching of the breath after the second word), while in the Quechua language of the Andean nations, it’s ‘mana’ or ‘manam’. Each of these five languages belongs to a different family.

Finally, this list ends with… well, more than words. To be precise: with signs. In American Sign Language, like other true sign languages throughout the world, each sign (consisting of handshape, starting position, ending position, and other physical or bodily clues) may not precisely correspond to a ‘word’ as usually defined. However, just as a spoken word transmits an idea to the hearer, or a written word to the reader, a sign similarly transmits an idea to the receiver.

In ASL, the sign for ‘no’ is shown below: a quick snapping together of index finger, middle finger and thumb—like a trap closing shut, perhaps snuffing out the possibility of whatever had been suggested?

[from: Valli, Clayton, Ed. The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language, 2005]

And while we’re snapping fingers—the exercise of signing ‘no’ brings me back to my earlier thought about the Chinese character ‘bù’ 不 : If some letters in ASL (for instance C, L, O, and V) are fingerspelled using signs that approximate the shapes of their written counterparts, couldn’t the Chinese word for ‘no’, which already looks vaguely hand-like, also be modeled by a hand sign? I tried it a few different ways, and my conclusion is:

… NO. Trying to make that connection is just too much of a stretch—both figuratively and literally.

Anyway, thanks for joining me in a tour through ‘no’. Tune in again for the next post… in which we finally get to ‘Yes’.

Notes:

¹ For those of you who are Pinyin sticklers: the Dao De Jing.

² Other fun cat sounds: ‘jau’ (Swedish), ‘yaawo’ (Wolof), ‘ya-ong’ (Korean), ‘niaou’ (Greek), ‘nyaa’ (Japanese), and ‘ngiyaw’ (Tagalog). But overall, ‘meow/miao/miau’ definitely wins in most languages, regardless of spelling.

³ Or alternatively aakka ᐋᒃᑲ. If you understand the distinction, I’d love to hear from you.