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On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 07:54:27AM -0500, John Cowan wrote: > Respectively from SIC 'thus' Of course! The word "si" comes from SIC; that makes perfect sense. > HOC ILLE 'this-that', HOC 'this'. I can see those; I had it in my head that the "yes" words were, like the articles and third-person personal pronouns, derived from demonstratives, which may be what kept me from thinking of SIC. > Similarly, "rien" and "nada" are from different parts of the > phrase NON REM NATAM 'no thing born' that came to be used for > 'nothing' in VL. Yup, knew that. > European Portuguese can still say "yes" by repeating > the main verb, a feature directly descended from Latin (and probably > from PIE). It seems as if most languages have innovated a yes-word over time; do you know of any modern natively-spoken language which lacks one? -Marcos