A cross-linguistic corpus of forms meaning yes

Abstract

Based on a carefully-compiled database of 604 attested forms for 'yes' taken from 512 languages spoken in over 70 countries, I show that this word exhibits a cross-linguistic tendency to contain laryngeal phonemes. As part of the statistical analysis I examine cognate items within specific genetic families and argue that certain phonotactic patterns involving 'yes' are not random in nature. These findings further corroborate the observation that glottal consonants often behave phonologically as a default or unmarked class of segments.

Keywords

• typology
• lexicon
• laryngeal
• affirmative