Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Yes and no; usually our thinking about these terms is influenced by the law of the excluded middle (a statement can be either true or false, but not both). Of course the world is a good deal messier than that. A suggestive picture.



I was prompted to think about this by coming across a list of words for 'yes' in 550 different languages. I felt compelled to find the equivalent list for 'no', then felt further compelled to get a sense of how they distribute across the alphabet, here's a graph - I find it fascinating that none of the languages have a word for either 'no' or 'yes' that begins with 'F':

No comments: