I've been localising Gnome to Irish recently on the train; its a task I can do on the old pentium-class laptop. Translating throws up interesting conundrums.

Firstly, Irish has no words for the abstract concepts "Yes" and "No". This means you've got to phrase a lot of the dialogs carefully : "Do you want to do X? " "I do" "I don't", so you use the same verb each time.

So, discussing this with friends, we wondered, whats the first word a native speaker of Irish learns (I learnt English as my first language); normally for babies, its "no". In Irish, we reckoned, it would be "Don't!" :-)

But, A Friend Isolde is an Old Irish (languages, that is) scholar. It turns out, Old Irish did have words for yes and no. How do you forget and drop constructs like "yes" and "no" from your language?