He's back!

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 31, 2006, at 8:46 AM, John Baker wrote:

>  ... The faculty page also links to an article about the teaching of
> the Irish language.  In the midst of some more plausible claims about
> the Irish language (that verbs come first, adjectives follow nouns,
> and
> so forth), we see the claim that there are no words for "yes" or
> "no" in
> Irish.  Is this really true?

well, yes, sort of.  the general celtic scheme for answering
questions is to respond with the verb of the question (for a positive
answer) or with this verb negated (for a negative answer).  so, a
question like "Do you see a dog?" would get either the response
"See" (positive) or the response "Don't see" (well, "Not see")
(negative).

it's a nifty scheme.  in particular, there's no special problem in
answering negative questions and other sorts of biased questions.
the same two answers are available for biased questions of all sorts:
"See" means 'I see a dog' and "Not see" means 'I don't see a dog',
regardless of the questioner's presuppositions.

arnold

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