Down yonder, a reader writes:
My daughter has been learning some Mandarin, and she advised me that
the expression for "yes" in Mandarin is "shi" (it is so) or "hao"
(okay). I checked it out at the following webpage:http://www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/yes.htm
That page also cites expressions for "yes" in Latin and Irish.
Thanks for the input, but what your daughter told you isn’t strictly correct.
In Mandarin, "shi" is the verb "to be," and it is used to signal agreement, but it isn’t a direct equivalent for "yes."
"Yes" is a particle that is used to signal agreement irrespective of the content of the question it answers. Questions like "Are you an American?" or "Can you speak English?" both get answered in English by "yes."
In languages that don’t have "yes," like Mandarin, agreement is signalled in a different way that generally depends on the content of the question. Typically, yes-less languages will grab the main verb of the question and use it to signal affirmation.
Thus if someone asks you in Mandarin "Ni hui shuo Yingwen ma?" ("Can you speak English?") , you’d grab the main verb "hui" (sounds like "whey", means "can") and use it where you’d use "yes" in English.
Similarly, if someone asks you "Ni shi Meiguo ren ma?" ("Are you an American?"), you’d grab the main verb "shi" (sounds like "sure", means "is/are/be") and use it in place of "yes."
(NOTE: These transliterations are very rough as the English alphabet is not designed to convey the sounds used in Mandarin; for example, "shi" actually sounds more like the English word "sure" clipped short, or just "shr!")
Other yes-less languages tend to do the same thing. That’s why, in translations of the liturgy, questions like "Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?" get answered with "I do" (grabbing the main verb) rather than "yes."
The same is true of Irish.
A while back I was reading a 20th century British apologist (Chesterton?) who noted that Irishmen who speak English tend to do this even in English as it’s the way their culture’s native language handles questions. Ask an Irishman "Are you a Catholic?" and you’re more likely to get the answer "I am" than you would if you asked an English or American Catholic the same question (they’d be more inclined to use "yes"). Upon reading this, I recognized that my friend from Dublin would do this all the time, but I hadn’t noticed it before.
As to the yes-in-550-languages page, pages like that are neat, but you have be careful. The people who put those pages together don’t really speak 550 languages, nor (so far as I can tell) are they linguists who could responsibly handle data from a language they don’t personally speak. As a result, there are errors and oversimplifications on those pages.
Thank you very much for this clarification.