Timeline for Why do all negating words start with the letter N?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 19, 2013 at 12:48 | history | edited | Kris | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 4 characters in body; edited tags
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| Nov 18, 2013 at 23:54 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | @Janus: Seem to me like your comments would make a nice answer to complement the existing ones. At least I'd upvote it if you did that. | |
| Nov 18, 2013 at 14:45 | answer | added | Kris | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 18, 2013 at 0:23 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @AndrewLeach: όχι is (like its Ancient Greek ancestor, ουκί/ουχί (sorry, can't do polytonic on my phone)) an elliptical structure like (ne) pas in French. It's lost quite a bit of steam, being originally from PIE *ne h2oiu-kwid ‘not in any eternity’ or more loosely, ‘not on your life’. Interestingly, the first part, *ne h2oiu ‘not in an eternity/not ever’ is what yields PGmc. *ne ai(w), which yields Old English ne ā > nā > na, which gives Modern English ‘no’! | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 21:03 | comment | added | Mitch | Hebrew/Arabic negation words start with 'l'. | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 19:41 | vote | accept | Sherlock | ||
| Nov 17, 2013 at 19:25 | answer | added | Colin Fine | timeline score: 5 | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 18:58 | comment | added | Barrie England | Confusingly, the Greek for ‘yes’ is ‘Ναί’. | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 18:37 | comment | added | Andrew Leach♦ | I offer Greek for the word of refusal, "No": όχι (óchi). I don't know whether this derived from the negative prefix α though (and that's probably out-of-scope for ELU.SE), but it appears on the face of it not to have much to do with n. | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 18:13 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | To add to @JohnLawler’s comment (in case of link death, etc.), even the negating prefixes a-, in-, and un- come from this *ne-. They represent the zero grade, n̥ (which in Greek and Indo-Iranian became a, in Italic developed a front vowel in front of it and went to in, and in Germanic developed a back vowel in front of it to become un). So they historically begin with an n, even if they don’t in the modern languages. | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 17:27 | comment | added | Sherlock | Could you add that as an answer please? | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 17:22 | comment | added | John Lawler | Not all words that imply negation start with N. That's true. Negation is a very big phenomenon. But there are an awful lot of words in an awful lot of languages that are important negatives and start with N. That's true, too, and the reason -- in Indo-European languages, anyway -- is that they -- as well as un-, in-, and a- -- all come from the same Proto-Indo-European root *ne-. | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 17:11 | comment | added | James Waldby - jwpat7 | I'm sure your idea is completely right, if you sample only words that start with n, in which case all negating words start with the letter n. But in fact lots of negating words start with a- (forms 2&3), ex-, in- (form 1). | |
| Nov 17, 2013 at 16:58 | history | asked | Sherlock | CC BY-SA 3.0 |