Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions and may have three-form or four-form systems.
About half the world's languages typically employ an echo response: repeating the verb in the question in an affirmative or a negative form.
"[8] Georg von der Gabelentz, Henry Sweet, and Philipp Wegener have all written on the subject of sentence words.
The yes or no in response to the question is addressed at the interrogator, whereas yes or no used as a back-channel item is a feedback usage, an utterance that is said to oneself.
However, Sorjonen criticizes this analysis as lacking empirical work on the other usages of these words, in addition to interjections and feedback uses.
As for ensample if a manne should aske Tindall himselfe: ys an heretike meete to translate Holy Scripture into Englishe ?
But and if the question be asked hym thus lo: is not an heretike mete to translate Holy Scripture into Englishe ?
To thys question in thys fashion framed if he will aunswere trewe Englishe he may not aunswere ye but he must answere yes, and say yes marry be they, bothe the translation and the translatour, and al that wyll hold wyth them.In fact, More's exemplification of the rule actually contradicts his statement of what the rule is.
This went unnoticed by scholars such as Horne Tooke, Robert Gordon Latham, and Trench, and was first pointed out by George Perkins Marsh in his Century Dictionary, where he corrects More's incorrect statement of the first rule, "No aunswereth the question framed by the affirmative.
Marsh found no evidence of a four-form system in Mœso-Gothic, although he reported finding "traces" in Old English.
He observed that in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, Marsh calls this four-form system of Early Modern English a "needless subtlety".
[20][21] Linguist James R. Hurford notes that in many English dialects "there are colloquial equivalents of Yes and No made with nasal sounds interrupted by a voiceless, breathy h-like interval (for Yes) or by a glottal stop (for No)" and that these interjections are transcribed into writing as uh-huh or mm-hmm.
[23][24] Art historian Robert Farris Thompson has posited that mm-hmm may be a loanword from a West African language that entered the English vernacular from the speech of enslaved Africans; linguist Lev Michael, however, says that this proposed origin is implausible, and linguist Roslyn Burns states that the origin of the term is difficult to confirm.
It may derive from the word I (in the context of "I assent"); as an alteration of the Middle English yai ("yes"); or the adverb aye (meaning always "always, ever"), which comes from the Old Norse ei.
[29] In the House of Commons of the British Parliament, MPs vote orally by saying "aye" or "no" to indicate they approve or disapprove of the measure or piece of legislation.
[29] The informal, affirmative phrase why-aye (also rendered whey-aye or way-eye) is used in the dialect of northeast England,[32][33] most notably by Geordies.
[33] In New England English, chiefly in Maine, ayuh is used; also variants such as eyah, ayeh or ayup.
[17][35][36][37][38] Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Hungarian, German, Dutch, French and Malayalam all have three-form systems.
Swedish, and to some extent Danish and Norwegian, also have additional forms javisst and jovisst, analogous to ja and jo, to indicate a strong affirmative response.
Swedish (and Danish and Norwegian slang) also have the forms joho and nehej, which both indicate stronger response than jo or nej.
is informal and may be casual or sarcastic, while അല്ല is the more formal way of saying "false", "incorrect" or that "it is not" and is a negative response for questions.
The modern day jā was borrowed from Middle High German ja and first appeared in 16th-century religious texts, especially catechisms, in answers to questions about faith.
At that time such works were usually translated from German by non-Latvians that had learned Latvian as a foreign language.
By the 17th century, jā was being used by some Latvian speakers that lived near the cities, and more frequently when speaking to non-Latvians, but they would revert to agreeing by repeating the question verb when talking among themselves.
There are several such adverbs classed as truth-value adverbs—including certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, videlicet, and minime (negative).
[citation needed] In Spanish, the words sí 'yes' and no 'no' are unambiguously classified as adverbs: serving as answers to questions and also modifying verbs.
The word no is the standard adverb placed next to a verb to negate it (Yo no tengo coche = I don't own a car).
The words "はい" (hai) and "いいえ" (iie) are mistaken by English speakers for equivalents to yes and no, but they actually signify agreement or disagreement with the proposition put by the question: "That's right."
Translation from two-form to three-form systems are equivalent to what English-speaking school children learning French or German encounter.
The German ja has no fewer than 13 English equivalents that vary according to context and usage (yes, yeah, and no when used as an answer; well, all right, so, and now, when used for segmentation; oh, ah, uh, and eh when used an interjection; and do you, will you, and their various inflections when used as a marker for tag questions) for example.