The English words 'no' and 'no' don't share a common ancestor. 'No', the opposite of 'yes', comes from Proto-West-Germanic *naiw (never), while 'no' as in 'no pain, no gain' comes from *nain (not any): it arose as a variant of 'none'.
'No' as opposed to 'yes' isn't related to German 'nein' and Dutch 'nee' either. Their only common part is 'n-', which comes from the Germanic negation particle *ne, also found in words such as 'not', 'neither' and 'never'.
Click the graphic to learn more:
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A short article on my Patreon (440 words) tells you more about words related to the ones depicted on the left side, such as 'either', 'naught', and German 'immer' (always):
https://www.patreon.com/posts/120053621
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Interestingly, 'no' (vs. 'yes') isn't related to Spanish 'no'.
English 'no' stems from *naiwan ("never"), as shown in my graphic above.
Spanish 'no' comes from Latin 'nōn', from Old Latin 'noinom' ("not one thing").
This means Spanish 'no' is related to German 'nein', from Proto-Germanic *nainan ("not one thing"), a distant cousin of 'noinom'!
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@yvanspijk Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic have no words for 'yes' or 'no' in response to a question.
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@yvanspijk what? I did not expect this. I always thought they had something in common in their etymology
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@meercat0 @yvanspijk English grammar comes from Welsh but vocabulary comes from many languages
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@peterbrown @meercat0 No, English grammar was inherited from Proto-Germanic. That's why English is a Germanic language. The influences of Welsh on English have been practically non-existent, which specialists agree on.
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@yvanspijk @meercat0 you can’t say I am going in German.
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@peterbrown @meercat0 'Ich bin am gehen'. Dutch has 'ik ben aan het gaan'.
The English progressive tenses developed centuries after the arrival on the British Isles, when linguistic contact with the Celtic speaking peoples wasn't strong enough to cause grammatical changes. Contact has to be very intensive for that, a situation in which English would've been flooded with loanwords as well.
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@yvanspijk @meercat0 you’re not listening are you?
The underlying grammar, the syntax and various other elements highlighted in that chart are from Brythonic. The present continuous tense didn’t “arrive” from anywhere. It was already here - spoken throughout France throughout England and probably most of Scotland. Caesar commented before invading England that the language spoken on both sides of the channel was the same. The French call it Gaulish and the Welsh call it Welsh.
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@peterbrown @meercat0 It was there in Celtic - Welsh, Gaulish etc. - not in English. Old English was brought to the British Isles by Germanic colonists (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) and didn't have a progressive tense. This tense only started to develop many centuries after this arrival.
All of this can be observed in the texts.
If you don't want to see that English and the Celtic languages are two different things that only had occasional influences on each other, our discussion ends here.
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@yvanspijk
And its no, nay, never, no more
will I play the wild rover no more.
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@yvanspijk I was wondering if the "no/non"* in romance languages are related to any of those words or if it is not related at all 🤔
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@prsfalken They are! They come from Latin 'nōn', from Old Latin 'noinom', which is 'ne' + 'oinom', literally "not one". So it's parallel to Proto-Germanic *nainan, which became German 'nein', Dutch 'nee' etc.
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@yvanspijk
In Afrikaans there is also "geen", abbreviated to "g'n" for "none". Wonder where that comes from...
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@nasyd100 From Dutch 'geen' < Middle Dutch 'negeen, engeen' < Old Dutch 'nehēn' < Proto-Germanic *neh ainaz (not even one).
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@yvanspijk
Thanks!
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@yvanspijk @nasyd100 German kein which though it looks totally different actually sounds fairly similar
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@peterbrown @nasyd100 That's because it has a similar origin: it comes from Old High German 'nih ein', which subsequently became 'nehein, enhein' > 'kein'.
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@yvanspijk this is so cool linguistics is such an interesting field
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@yvanspijk But no and no both come from Proto-Germanic ne ? So ne splits to naiw and nain which end up as no no?
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@ppscrv As the infographic shows, *ne was only one of the two ingredients of *naiwaz and *nainaz. The other ingrediënts were *aiwaz and *ainaz. It's like the words 'forget' and 'forgive', which both contain the element 'for-'.
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@yvanspijk But is like Mr X has children with Ms A and with Ms B. Mr X would still be a common ancestor to Ms A's and Ms B's descendents. I think. But that is not how it works elements of language?
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@ppscrv No, doesn't work like that in languages, because that would mean that all English words starting with 'un-' ('unravel', 'unwind' etc.) would have the same origin too. What's important is the stem, and even then, 'to forget' and 'to beget' are certainly related, but they don't have the same origin; all we can say is they're both derivatives of 'to get'.
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@yvanspijk I see. I think. Perhaps it looks tricky because ne and no are so short. And ne is possibly not even a stem at all.
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@yvanspijk
I wonder if other (Germanic) languages also share similar yep/nope forms of the yes/no words. German certainly has jap, jep, jop, jup in colloquial speech (and texting).
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@yvanspijk (I wondered were the English "Nay" was in this... and found it unexpectedly under Old West Norse...?)
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@steinarb Yes, it was borrowed from the Vikings. :)
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@yvanspijk @steinarb since the original Brythonic had no words for yes or no it is logical they would borrow these useful shorthand words from Norse or Germanic roots
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@peterbrown @steinarb Actually, the people who borrowed it were speakers of Old English, who already had a word for "yes". In that period, the Celtic speaking peoples had already been driven back to the north and west of the isle, areas not under the Danelaw.
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@yvanspijk @steinarb the people didn’t move - they stayed where they were. And they carried on speaking their own language, absorbing words into it like skat (tax or penalty) . The word survives, changed slightly, as scot-free. 
We know they carried on speaking the same language because the grammar of English is still Brythonic. If they had changed language, there would be no present continuous tense in English but as we know, it is the most common tense.
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@peterbrown @steinarb I'm sorry, but the graphic you shared wasn't made by a linguist specialised in this matter. The do-periphrasis, like the progressive tense, arose very late. The grammar of English evolved from Proto-Germanic, as I said. Any scholar with knowledge of the history of English grammar agrees on that, and the information can be found in all books on the topic written by professional linguists. Let's stick to the facts here.
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@yvanspijk @steinarb ooooh, wasn’t made by a trained linguist. So it must be wrong.
Well, I’ve got news for you. Picasso wasn’t a trained artist.
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@peterbrown @steinarb
If you're not interested in linguistic insights, please do keep believing in what you believe, but don't bother people who do know what they're talking about.
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@yvanspijk is it a coincidence that in American English the opposite of "yes" can also be "nah" but the quantifier can't be? ("you like to lift?" "nah, not really, but no pain no gain")
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@spacewizard It's not a coincidence, because 'no' and 'no' are still two different words with different uses. Words for 'no' (as opposed to 'yes') get variants in many languages, based on intonation and other nuances, but that doesn't go for determiners like 'no' as in 'no water'. For example, Dutch 'nee' has variants such as 'neu', 'nèè' etc.
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@yvanspijk What is this based on, etymological dictoinaries or...?
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@sorensorensen Yes, the Oxford English Dictionary, Philippa et al. (2003-2009), 'Etymologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands' among others.
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