Comment by sircastor
2 years ago
There may be an obvious language barrier here, but the coupling of a positive with a negative response feels very odd to me in English. I'm reminded of the old song (it was used for an advertising jingle for a product or company I can't remember) "Yes, we have no bananas!"
Adjacently, I really dislike the courtroom phrasing "Isn't it true?" that is sometimes depicted in legal dramas.
Indeed.
>"Do you not have X?"
In my head it sounds belligerent and accusatory. While the other form sounds polite.
This negative phrasing to induce a positive response, may be a Japan only thing?
It's probably more like "You wouldn't happen to have any X?". I assume the idea is that you put the emphasis on the asker being the one to ask a silly question if they indeed don't have it.
Maybe it also helps that all the sentence markers that make a sentence polite, negative, interrogative all get added on to the end (to the verb) in japanese, which probably makes the construction slightly less awkward. In this case it may go something like motsu (to have) -> mochimasu (to have, polite) -> mochimasen (to not have, polite) -> mochimasenka (to not have, polite, interrogative).
I'm making a lot of assumptions here though, I don't know if this is anywhere close to correct.
It's interesting, it somehow means you are agreeing with them if they don't have it, so they don't have to feel so bad about not having it.
I'm from Appalachia and we have the same thing, and yeah at least for us it's like you're agreeing with them that they don't have it.
"Do you not have bananas?" is like "is it true that there are no bananas?". Then if there are bananas, the host can gleefully surprise you with them and feel like they solved a problem for you. This is only if it's said in a constantly upwardly-shifting tone, though.
It can be said another way, same words different tone, which sounds more like "how perplexing, there's no bananas, let me just make sure I didn't miss them because I thought they should be here". The host usually backs their answer up with an explanation of why there are no bananas.
A third form exists where it does sound accusatory. Like "you should have bananas you piece of crap". Usually said in a huffy puffy I-dont-have-time-for-this tone.
2 replies →
Interesting. Maybe more like a "You don't have x, right?" than a "do you not have x?"
"Do you guys not have phones?"
I have noticed the same thing. A "yes" or "no" answer could refer to the truth-value of the situation or to the polarity used in the question.
I personally avoid this construction at all costs. When someone asks a negative question, I reply with "you're right" instead of "yes" to mean I agree with the negativity.