Linguistic thought of the day

theinkstainsblog:

missalsfromiram:

thereallieutenantcommanderdata:

runawaymarbles:

native English speakers don’t tend to say “yes.” 

My clients are about 50/50 native and non-native English speakers, and non-native English speakers are pretty much the only ones who say “yes” when I ask them a question.

Native English speakers almost always say “yeah” or “sure”, unless it’s for emphasis. (“Is now a good time?” “Sure” vs “Is this your first baby?” “Yes he is!!”) 

I’ve noticed that with yes and no. Both of those sound abrupt by themselves (“no” to a lesser extent than “yes”). “Did you do it?” “Yes”. To me, that would sound like someone who’s annoyed by the question, perhaps because it’s been asked repeatedly. For yes/no to work, they have to be followed by something else, like your example, or by a word like sir or ma’am.

I’ve reblogged a post like this before but I suspect this is an indication that the meanings of yes (and yeah) and no are actually changing – that English is undergoing a shift from a two-form affirmative-negative system to something else, such as an echo system (like Irish or Chinese uses) (except that in English we don’t have to repeat the whole verb, we can just use the auxiliary do).

I.e. this is why, I think, it’s so common for people to use “yeah, no” to deny something and “no, yeah, totally” to affirm something – “yeah” and “no” by themselves are too ambiguous, so we have to reinforce them by, for example, when we deny something, affirming the negative (“Yeah…”) and then denying the positive (“…no”), or when we affirm something, by denying the negative (“No…”) and then affirming the positive (“…yeah, totally!”). Maybe this kind of thing will stick around, or maybe it’ll shift to more of an echo system – I find myself saying “Yeah, I do” and “No, I don’t” a lot more than just the words “Yeah” and “No” by themselves.

This situation reminds me of how, when the Latin demonstratives were turning into articles, writers had to add additional decitic words to ille, illa, and illud in order to make their reference sufficiently specific – e.g. just “that man” by itself was starting to mean “the man”, so to mean “that man” they had to say things like “that aforementioned man” or “that particular man”.

Good tips for if your dialogue isn’t sounding realistic to your ear!