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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

A nice Italian word that might be hard to translate is "ni" which means "yes and no" (literally first letter of "no" and second letter of "si", which means yes).

Often I hear English speakers use the answer "It depends." where an Italian would use "Ni."

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German has jein (ja+nein).

Slightly different, french has "mouais", a sort of mmhokay, yeah i guess.

In modern everyday conversation you can often use "ish" for that ("sort of").

We use a similar word in Portuguese: nim (n for nao/ no and im for sim/yes)

I never heard it here in Brazil, is it a thing in Portugal or in parts of Brazil other than the South/South East ?

Seems like that translates to "yes and no" pretty well, no?

Ni. On one hand that's exactly what it means, yet the fact that a sizeable fraction of Italian speakers accepted a new lexeme in their heads means that it has an extra expressive power, perhaps due the word play, that conveys an extra layer of meaning that would be lost if you just say "yes and no" (i.e. "si e no" or "no e si").

Funny enough, sometimes it's even hard to transate the untranslatability of something.

it's not a translation, but the replacement in function is the "actually" opener, which conveys the "ni" "you are almost right but"

Isn't that just "maybe"?

No. There is a word for maybe/perhaps which is "forse".

The difference is that "maybe" implied something is not known or can't be known or may or may not happen, as a matter of possiblity/probability.

"Ni" OTOH is a statement that the question has no definite answer. It's not just that either option can be true, but the question is I'll poses, or the problem is more nuanced etc.

I think a native British English speaker would use maybe in both senses though you'd have to work it out from context. As in. A:'Do you want to go out with me' B:'Maybe...'.

In my dialect, "yeah nah", which means no. Or "yeah nah", which means yes.

Aussie? :)

Nah, thousands of km off :)

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