3.791 yes, no, yeah yeah, hai! (206)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Mon, 27 Nov 89 22:17:28 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 791. Monday, 27 Nov 1989.


(1) Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 18:01:12 EST (6 lines)
From: Norman Zacour <ZACOUR@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Yes and no

(2) Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 21:16:39 EST (19 lines)
From: Richard Mitchell <MITCHELR@ORSTVM>
Subject: Re: 3.780 no and yes, cont. (49)

(3) Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 20:25:10 EST (31 lines)
From: unhd!psc90!jdg@uunet.UU.NET (Dr. Joel Goldfield)
Subject: "Apocryphal 'yes'?"

(4) Date: 27 November 89, 12:22:46 EMT (23 lines)
From: Knut Hofland +47 5 212954/55/56 FAFKH at NOBERGEN
Subject: Yes/no in the LOB corpus

(5) Date: 27 November 1989 (25 lines)
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: yes and no

(6) Date: 27 Nov 89 13:36:28 gmt (14 lines)
From: K.P.Donnelly@EDINBURGH.AC.UK
Subject: Yes and no

(7) Date: Monday, 27 November 1989 1212-EST (43 lines)
From: KRAFT@PENNDRLS
Subject: Yea/Nay

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 18:01:12 EST
From: Norman Zacour <ZACOUR@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Yes and no

I suspect that Peter Abelard, the author of "Sic et Non", would
have been surprised to hear that Latin had no word for yes.
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------26----
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 21:16:39 EST
From: Richard Mitchell <MITCHELR@ORSTVM>
Subject: Re: 3.780 no and yes, cont. (49)


The "yes-no" discussion might be enlightened by Bergon's essay on the
the ideal of "nothing," Chapter IV in Creative Evolution. My version is
a translation by Arthur Mitchell, Henry Holt and Company, 1913.
Bergson's point is that humans are the species distinguished by their
use of the negative. Humans are separated from other species by their
preoccupation with what is NOT here, NOT now, not as it seems in the
phenomenonal present. It is the distinctively human quality to
construct a history and to anticipate a future, to plan and strive for
what is not now, here. Certainly other species seek the gratification of
visceral churnings (the Freudian libidinal urges perhaps being the
human counterpart) but only conscious human social actors orient so much
of their life energieg what is NOT. Kenneth Burke has stressed the
importance of Bergon's insights in an essay which I have temporarily
misplaced. Richard Mitchell, Sociology, Oregon State University.
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------44----
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 20:25:10 EST
From: unhd!psc90!jdg@uunet.UU.NET (Dr. Joel Goldfield)
Subject: "Apocryphal 'yes'?"

Does anyone recall an incident which may have occurred at Princeton
University in the mid-1970's regarding a well-known linguist lecturing
about negatives, affirmatives, double negatives and double affirmatives?
I may have read of this embarrassing anecdote in _Parade_ magazine. Can
anyone tell me whether this incident actually took place and where it
may be reported?

In any case, said linguist was lecturing before a packed auditorium
about the various civilizations he had studied. In some, a single
negative marker might be just that or an affirmative (perhaps
contradicting a negative statement or question). An affirmative could
be just that or, in certain contexts, a negative. A double negative
could be, depending upon the language and civilization, a negative or
even an affirmative marker. However, for all languages and all
civilizations, and this was an important basis for a book he was he was
sure that although there are those in which a double affirmative is in
essence an affirmative marker, there are absolutely NONE in which a
double affirmative could ever be a negative marker.

In a stunned, respectful silence into which muffled chuckles soon crept,
a voice with a distinctly New York ethnic accent replied from the back
of the auditorium:

Yeah, yeah.

Regards,
j_goldfi@unhh.bitnet Joel D. Goldfield
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------35----
Date: 27 November 89, 12:22:46 EMT
From: Knut Hofland +47 5 212954/55/56 FAFKH at NOBERGEN
Subject: Yes/no in the LOB corpus

In the tagged LOB corpus (1 million words, 15 different text categories)
yes and no have the following frequencies:

no: 2408
1876 as article
3 as cited word
116 as pronoun
188 as adverb
225 as interjection

yes: 221
5 as cited word
216 as interjection



Knut Hofland

The Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities
(5) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 27 November 1989
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: yes and no

Knut Hofland's note has inspired me to check -- very quickly, and
without any analytical tools other than a frequency list -- the
occurrences of yes and no in the collected conversations of Humanist.
Altogether, in the 12Mb of text accumulated from 7 May 1987 until the
end of October 1989, my statistics show these frequencies:

"no" (perhaps incl. the abbrev. for "number" sans period): 3096
"non" 495
"none" 96
"non-" (prefix) 70

"yea" 4
"yeah" 1
"yes" 168 Thus, in total "yes" occurs somewhat less
than 5% as frequently as "no".
Caveat....


Yours, Willard McCarty


(6) --------------------------------------------------------------26----
Date: 27 Nov 89 13:36:28 gmt
From: K.P.Donnelly@EDINBURGH.AC.UK
Subject: Yes and no

Gaelic (both Irish and Scottish varieties) has no word for 'yes' or 'no'.
You have to repeat part of the particular question - usually the verb,
in either positive or negative form.

It is going to make it difficult to provide the "yes/no query" facility
which, along with date formats, alphabetic collation sequences and so on,
is on the agenda for an international standard language independent
program interface!

Kevin Donnelly
(7) --------------------------------------------------------------48----
Date: Monday, 27 November 1989 1212-EST
From: KRAFT@PENNDRLS
Subject: Yea/Nay

Thanks to Jay Treat and Robin Smith for helping to show some of the
complexities of attempting any sort of response to Mike Hawley's
comments on the use of positives/negatives in languages. Since I had
already taken the necessary 10 minutes or so to do a followup on Mike's
statistics for "King James Version" usage (on my old IBYCUS), I will
ignore Jay's plea i for cessation and make a couple of further points:

(1) For any such claims involving search statistics, one ought to
identify exactly what text is being searched -- this is a point that
butts up against the discussion of copyright and of related issues such
as "quality control." The following statistics are based on searching
the corrected CCAT form of the KJV (including Apocrypha), the exact
origin of which is not known (the Apocrypha are from an undated Oxford
edition that probably was issued ca 1920). The base for this text was
published in fixed, read-only form, on the PHI CD-ROM #1 in December
1987, and was prepared by CCAT by collating and adapting electronic
texts (without Apocrypha) obtained from various sources (BYU, Zondervan,
networks). The Apocrypha were added by CCAT (scanned & corrected).

(2) Using David Packard's LEX program on the old IBYCUS
mini, and the "statistics only" option, turned up the
following numbers --
yes = 4 (not "two"; Matt, Mark, Romans twice)
yea = 392
no = 1711
nay = 56
verily = 143

(3) I did not bother to do a similar search of the related Greek and
Hebrew texts, but made one quick probe into the ancient Greek
translations (collectively called "Septuagint") of Jewish scriptures,
based on the Rahlfs text encoded by TLG and adapted by CCAT (also on the
PHI #1 CD-ROM) with the result that the explicit Greek "nai" occurs only
8 times (and at least one of those is a proper name!), while the
negative particles that I could think of off-hand (ou, ouk, oux, ouxi,
mh) occurred 2930 times. The general preponderance of terms of negation
seems undeniable; what it all may mean is quite another matter!

Bob Kraft, U.Penn (CCAT, CATSS)