Nepal's Kusunda Language, Which Has No Known Origin, Also Has No Words For 'Yes' or 'No' (bbc.com) 86
From a report, shared by a reader: Through the winter mist of the hills of the Terai, in lowland Nepal, 18-year-old Hima Kusunda emerges from the school's boarding house, snug in a pink hooded sweatshirt. Hima is one of the last remaining Kusunda, a tiny indigenous group now scattered across central western Nepal. Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction. According to the latest Nepali census data from 2011, there are 273 Kusunda remaining. But only one woman, 48-year-old Kamala Khatri, is known to be fluent.
Glass half full (Score:2)
I guess they are the glass half full kind of people. If you ask them if they are hungry, they will answer "I'm not really hungry but I can eat." :-)
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[...] they will answer "I'm not really hungry but I can eat."
They won't, because they have no word for "not". They'll probably either say "I will eat" or "I'll just drink water".
Re:Glass half full (Score:5, Funny)
But only one woman, 48-year-old Kamala Khatri, is known to be fluent.
Or, maybe she isnt that fluent?
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Maybe they had 50 shades of maybe.
Re: Glass half full (Score:2)
It might just be more like Japanese where "no" comes in the form of a misdirection
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-... [quora.com]âoeNoâ
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Perhaps they just use "Sounds good" and "Meh"
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37 words for "maybe".
So it shuld rellay be called (Score:5, Funny)
Vaguelish.
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Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated
Probably yet another one of Google's bazillion language projects like Go, Carbon, Dart, Sawzall, and many others. Expect to see an LLVM front-end for Kusunda any time now.
Perfect diplomatic language (Score:2)
including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction
I know that across the world, French is considered the language of diplomacy - but read that fragment of the summary and tell me that Kusunda is not the ideal language for politicians and diplomats.
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Bad for car dealers though. You'd never be able to leave.
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Perfect language for those who just can't stand hearing no.
Re:Perfect diplomatic language (Score:4, Informative)
There are many languages with that property including the language French is based on: Latin. That doesn't mean there aren't expressions of affirmation or denial. You still have an ability to agree or disagree with something, it just doesn't take the same form as "yes" which uniquely acts as its own sentence.
Most Asian languages do not contain "yes" or "no", they contain only agreement or disagreement with a preposition. Such as Japanese "hai" doesn't translate to "yes" but rather to "${preposition} is correct". The word can't stand on its own like yes or no.
Same in Latin, the closest thing to "yes" that language contains is also an affirmation of a preposition: "ita" translates to "It is so".
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Most Asian languages do not contain "yes" or "no" Such as Japanese "hai" doesn't translate to "yes" but rather to "${preposition} is correct".
Yeah, in many languages there is no one word that translates exactly to English "yes" and not one word that translates exactly to "no". There are many different words depending on the context. "Hai" is closer to "Correct" when answering someone in Japanese. But in German which I think is the language closest to English, the word for "no" can be different words in the same sentence. From my very basic German I remember that "No, I speak no German" translates to "Nein, ich spreche kein Deutch" where "nein" a
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IIRC the German "kein" is generally in reference to a noun (e.g. "none"), and "nicht" is in reference to a verb (e.g. "can not"). "Nein" is the standalone "no".
In my native language of Finnish the negation word is actually a verb. It's grammatically very different from English. So a sentence like "minulla ei ole rahaa" (I have no money) is constructed like "on-me doesn't be money".
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Yes correct, the curiosity is in English you can also reference a noun with "no". "I learnt no German today" :-), but in German the forms for "no" are split.
kein = no/none, nicht = not, nein = no (exclamative form only).
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Yeah, but that is not German. :P
That is Bavarian. Only linguists would call it a dialect of German, everyone else calls it its own language
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Also "kein" and "nicht" mean "not" but I forget the exact scenarios when to use which.
Close. Very close. "Nicht" means "not", whereas "kein" means "no/none". It's quite similar to english in that "not" is usually used to negate verbs, whereas no/none are general negations and also have a pronoun form.
E.g.
"I will nicht Deutsch lernen" - "I do not want to learn German"
"I habe kein Deutsch gelernt" - "I have learnt no German"
"Wie viel Deutsch kennst du? Keins." - "How much German do you know? None." (pronoun form).
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Native German here.
'Nein' means 'No'.
'Kein' means something akin to 'None'. It means the absent amount of something. E.g.:
'Kein Geld' -> 'No money'.
'Kein Essen' -> No food'
'Ich spreche kein Deutsch' -> I don't speak (any) German
There is an extension to 'Kein', 'Keinerlei', which is a (really tiny) bit sloppy and means 'No amount of x in any kind and way'. Where its opposite 'Allerlei' means 'all kinds of'. And 'Allerlei' is based on 'Alle' which means 'all'. And 'Alle' is kind of the opposite of 'K
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Nein - no
Ja - yes
nicht - not
kein - not any
Re: Perfect diplomatic language (Score:2)
As a Japanese speaker, I'll point out that the word for yes is not "hai" but "ee". You can also say "un" in plain form. And the word for no is "iie".
I suggest you learn about a language before making claims about its vocabulary.
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Eee is informal
Hai is formal
Perhaps you should take your own hint :P
If a police officer asks you for papers, you answer "Hai!"
If your wife asks if you like the soup, you say a long sighted out "Eeeee".
And for those not speaking Japanese: "E" in this case is pronounced like in bed, not like "see" or "sea".
Or another example, a teacher tells a student to "try better", the student answers Hai.
The student asks if this is good enough, the teacher says "Ee!"
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I suggest you learn about a language before making claims about its vocabulary.
I suggest you look up Dunning Kruger. Hai and ee both losely translate to agreement, one is formal, one is casual. Both are typically translated to "yes". And neither can be used in all the situations that "yes" can.
You can type words into Google, but you're not going to learn the subtle differences of how words interact with larger grammar. There's more to language than just vocabulary. I suggest you cut the snark next time you make a fool of yourself trying to correct someone.
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Such as Japanese "hai" doesn't translate to "yes" but rather to "${preposition} is correct".
That is incorrect. Hai indeed means Yes and Iie means No. To agree to something is Doi and asserting correctness is TA dashi.
However there are languages like Thai, where you can not simply say yes or no (despite the fact that both words exist), you basically have to repeat the question and add yes/no at the appropriated place.
Q: "Did you enjoy the movie?"
A: "No, I did not enjoy the movie".
A simple "no" is "grammatic
Re: Perfect diplomatic language (Score:2)
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A simple "no" is "grammatically" not correct
False. You are using an example of one particular context. "No" has an exclamative form. It can stand grammatically correct on it's own. It can also form pro-sentences which leads to confusing situations where you don't know if the word "no" is affirming a subject or negating a sentence.
"Did you not understand what I said about yes and no?"
"No" - both negates the negation (yes you understood), or affirms the subject (no you didn't).
Both forms are grammatically correct.
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Simple (Score:1)
How does "I don't take "no" for an answer" translates in Kusundan?
"I don't take answers, only money".
See? Perfect diplomatic language.
Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe not.
There is a single person who self-reports as being fluent. This is a dead language, and we know nothing about it. And we never will. None of them talked to anthropological linguists in time to record any useful knowledge of the language.
We have one relatively young person who claims to be fluent. This is not the situation you'd expect, and it raises serious questions. Questions that cannot be answered, because of the direction that time flows.
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad to see we have amr chair experts here instead of the linguistic experts who have been involved in trying to document the language. Maybe they'll see your post and reach our for your expert advice.
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> Maybe not.
I see what you did there.
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If you consider 47 to be relatively young in Nepal, then sure.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Informative)
We also have a grammar [escholarship.org] for the language that indicates it does have a negative. (hat tip [upenn.edu])
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Having a way to conjugate as a negative is not a word for "No".
Even languages which do have words which can be used for "yes" and "no", it can still be grammatically correct to not use such words as we do in English. Take Mongolian (of which I know a little) where agreement is properly done by repeating the critical phrase and negation is properly done similarly but with a negation suffix, instead of a yes or no response.
A question like "Do you have food?" would be answered with the literal response of
Re: That's not how language/linguistics works (Score:2)
There is a single person who self-reports as being fluent. This is a dead language, and we know nothing about it. And we never will. None of them talked to anthropological linguists in time to record any useful knowledge of the language.
We have one relatively young person who claims to be fluent. This is not the situation you'd expect, and it raises serious questions. Questions that cannot be answered, because of the direction that time flows.
That's not how linguistics works.
Suppose you self-report as being fluent in Japeranto, your own fictitious language with characteristics derived from both Japanese and Esperanto. Now a linguist's job would be to document as much of the language as possible -- regardless of its origin being your imagination or that of others -- and report about their findings.
The depth and breadth of their findings may be generally noteworthy or not. But the self-reporting of fluency is distinctly untethered from the con
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The situation you describe, though, would have the language that the woman speaks be a different language than the one of the group that it is reported as being. You really wanted to argue, but you failed.
When I was a teenager, a friend and I made up a language consisting of only one word; "chips." And we were able to communicate just fine. You could study this language, if you wanted to. But no such legitimization would turn it into French.
Re: That's not how language/linguistics works (Score:1)
This would be more a cant than a language, as it's obfuscatory in nature.
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Well, you're not a True Scotsman either, so I can't imagine you winning on that basis.
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The situation you describe, though, would have the language that the woman speaks be a different language than the one of the group that it is reported as being. You really wanted to argue, but you failed.
That's nice. I'll stick to my multiple years of linguistics studies at university (as taught by faculty with decades of linguistics experience themselves) over your personal sentiments on the matter.
The point is that you're arguing about the amount of self-reported fluent speakers of the language (unless you're being sexist and arguing that the woman should be ignored) rather than the notion of the existence of the language. My point is that the number of fluent speakers (self-reported or otherwise) is w
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She is fluent in the (subset) of the language she knows.
No point in arguing about "how fluent" one is in such a situation.
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Mandarin Chinese doesn't have words for yes and no either. It's actually not that uncommon in languages.
In Chinese you can say things like "I don't want [that]" or "don't do [that]", but not just a generic "no". You have to be slightly more specific.
That's where the "do not want" meme comes from - on the Chinese subtitles for Star Wars Revenge of the Sith when Darth Vader says "nooooooo!" it gets translated as "[I] do not want [that to have happened]". For some reason the English subtitle on the disk is a m
SPLUNGE. (Score:1)
Like Latin... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Latin is also a language without the words "yes" or "no".
(It does allow you to negate a sentence, though.)
Re:Like Latin... (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't very unusual. Mandarin, Thai, Finnish, and many other lanuages have the same property.
Also, there are many other lanuage isolates, [wikipedia.org] a term which refers to the status of researchers' knowledge, rather than anything about the language itself.
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I'm curious about this - do they literally just mean no words 'yes' and 'no', or do they mean there are no words for expressing agreement / opposition?
My mind is too small to comprehend how you'd even communicate if you didn't have language constructs to distinguish between is and isn't - even "correct" vs "incorrect" or similar.
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Mandarin has multiple ways of affirming and negating. Yes in mandarin can be used by words such as "dui", "shi". There's also multiple ways of negating in mandarin. Bu being the most common.
Re:Like Latin... (Score:4, Interesting)
In Japanese, if you offer something to somebody, "I'm good" means "no," and something like "I will have it" means "yes". Using the words "no" and "yes" directly is often considered to be a little bit rude.
So in the case of Japanese, there are ways to express agreement / opposition, they just won't always translate literally into the words "yes" or "no".
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Every language needs the ability to express agreement or denial of a preposition. It's core for a language to function. The difference is in how it is done. In English "yes" is a single word that doesn't reference anything. It is considered its own sentence. Many other languages don't have such a word.
To the OP's example: Latin. You don't say "yes", you say "ita" which references a subject from the previous sentence, the most literal translation being "It is so", or if you had to condense it to a single wor
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Every language needs the ability to express agreement or denial of a preposition. It's core for a language to function. The difference is in how it is done.
English negation isn't just at the level of a proposition as a whole. It also can negate arbitrary sub-clauses, just like the negation operator in logic. For instance, these two sentences have very different meaning:
"The doctor told me I have to not eat".
"The doctor told me I do not have to eat".
In modern Italian there's only a single sentence which ambiguously means either of them.
"Il dottore mi ha detto che non devo mangiare".
Actually, I guess colloquially in English we often confuse the two also...
"All t
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Mandarin
Not sure where you get that.
Shi, and bu shi.
Equivalent in cantonese is: hai, and m hai.
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The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] says they use echo responses.
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I think people are confusing not having exact one-to-one correspondence with words with having no words to the effect in context.
Like I've said, and the Wikipedia article says: shi, and bu shi, and the cantonese equivalent hai, and m hai, are basically "yes" and "no".
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I think people are confusing not having exact one-to-one correspondence with words with having no words to the effect in context.
Clearly some people did make that mistake, but I thought it was perfectly clear. Some languages use words like the English "yes" and "no". Some, like Mandarin and apparently Ksuunda, express those meanings in another way. The idea of a language having no way to give affirmative or negative respnoses is asinine, of course.
The sensationalist story tried too hard to make Kusunda seem exotic.
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In latin yes is: sic (or sometimes ita)
And surprisingly no is: non
Sorry, no idea were that myth is coming from. Someone else claimed the same, but I answered by accident to you.
There are other variations, for reference: https://latin.stackexchange.co... [stackexchange.com]
Sic semper Latin [Re:Like Latin...] (Score:2)
English actually has two different meanings of no; "no" as an answer ("do you have bananas?" "no") and no as an adjective ("we have no bananas".)
The Latin "non" is the adjective.
With that said, though, you're quite right, the classic Romans had a dozen words they could use to answer a yes/no question. Typically they'd just repeat or negate the verb (est/non est). But, as you say, sic ("thus") can work in context too.
Interesting as a historical footnote, but... (Score:1)
The purpose of language is to communicate. If there's nobody left to communicate with in that language, then it becomes merely a historical curiosity.
As a historical curiosity I can see where some people might be interested in it as a hobby, but I don't see where anyone should be going after tax dollars or public grants to pursue it.
But the purpose of studying language is much more. (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't say... (Score:2)
And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no"
__ kidding?
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Yes, and it's far more readable than Python.
Extinct because no agreement to mating possible (Score:2)
The one place you can't get turned down (Score:1)
Not a new controversy (Score:2)
SchrÃdinger's language (Score:2)
It's pretty wild that a language bases yes and no on degrees of probability.
Re:Schroedinger's language (Score:2)
The umlaut didn't come through, apparently. Won't try that again.
How did they find this out? (Score:2)
Researcher: "Does you language have a word for ,'no'?"
Nepalese: "..."
Researcher: "Does you language have a word for ,'yes'?"
Nepalese: "..."
Researcher: "I hate you people..."
Not unique (Score:2)
The article makes it sound that this language being unrelated to any other is a unique thing:
There are many languages that are known to be language isolates [wikipedia.org], including Basque and Korean.
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And if you'd made it to the second sentence before you linked, you'd have found out that Korean is actually a commonly cited incorrect example.
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If you followed the link from the page you looked at, you'd see that the Korean language family consists of about one and a half languages. What do I mean by a "half" language? Well, the other language in the family is Jeju, which is one of those borderline things: is it a dialect of Korean, or a separate language? To be fair, it reportedly fails the mutual intelligibility test (Korean speakers can't understand Jeju), which linguists use to distinguish languages from dialects.
Semi-related fact: I once ha
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I'm suspicious of isolates. I don't know the current status of Genevieve von Petzinger's work, but she had identified 32 common signs used everywhere from Indonesia to France, between 44,000 and 12,000 BC. (These symbols also appear in Vinca script from 6,000 BC, although there's some ambiguity as to whether they'd have retained their meaning. I assume they would have, but that's an assumption and not a proven fact.) These signs are used on everything from bone combs to figurines to cave paintings. They don
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You shouldn't be "suspicious" of isolates. It is simply a description of the ability to classify it in relation to other languages. Based on what we currently know of the human colonization of the world outside of Africa - it appears a few thousand people were a founding group that emigrated 75000 years ago - we can reasonably hypothesize that there was one group of related dialects that they shared, and that all languages in the world today outside of Africa developed from this group.
The time depth is even
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Ok, fair enough. "Not traceably relatable" is pretty much the conclusion I reached, and if that (as opposed to "completely unrelated") is what is meant by a language isolate then that's perfectly reasonable.
My concern was more about the argument that you do sometimes see there that there was never a pan-Eurasian language, or a single language spoken by any given wave of humans leaving Africa, and that therefore isolates in Europe and Asia were developed totally independently with no common ancestor, known o
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"new languages have been constantly coming to existence": That happens sometimes (Creoles, and recently artificial languages), but most language change is not about that: it's about the slow change of sounds, like /p/ turning into /f/, or /h/ disappearing--and of course the occasional new word for some new technology, or some newly encountered animal or plant. When this happens in some regions where a language is spoken, but not in others, then you eventually have two daughter languages. But they didn't "
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For an informed take-down of the 12,000 year old "super-conserved" word list, see here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.... [upenn.edu].
As for von Petzinger's work, if you look at the symbols, it's pretty obvious why they're widely found. And no one knows whether they represented anything, i.e. whether they were the written form of a language. Nor does anyone know whether the Vinca symbols are actually a script, that is, a writing system. Like other such early symbols, it's impossible to know. And of the Vinca inscri
Interesting. (Score:1)
According to this... (Score:2)
https://nepaliaashish.wordpres... [wordpress.com]
The Kusundas as the last remnant of the migration out of Africa that went on to settle such places as Australia. This would imply that their civilization and language are older than the Australian Aborigines. This makes it absolutely critical to record everything possible of what's left.
They'll have had more influence from the Denisovans (I can't find any data on how much Denisovan DNA they have) by dint of being in contact with them for tens of thousands more years than any
Similar, Irish does not have words for yes/no (Score:2)
e.g. If you ask me "An bhfuil tú ann? (Are you there?)" then my reply would be "Tá mé (I am)"