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Is it? I heard it in Yiddish a lot too. I tought it came from there
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Apparently it is found in German, Dutch, Polish, and Czech without any change in spelling, and in Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Sanskrit with the same sound. And in (modern) Hebrew and Swedish with only a slight difference in vowel; nǔ and nå to be specific.
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Not exactly, in Polish it's "no" (pronounced like "not", but without a "t").
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It came either from Slavic via Yiddish, or from Slavic languages directly.
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Well, Zamenhof was a Polish Jew who was raised by a linguist, and spoke several of the languages in the list I found. And he did tend to prefer words with a broad usage base already. So…
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I listened several times. The word "Nu" was incomprehensible to me. Sounded like a verbal seizure. But, now it will stick in my memory better though.
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Cxu vi nur havis hemorragio, Pam? Estas "Neniu estas perfekta." Mojosa hemorragio, Pam.
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Vi vivas kaj vi lernas gxin, kaj se mi eraras kelkfoje, neniu estas perfekta
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Jes, vere lama. Aŭ ĉu estas ljama?
Nu, ne estas lamaa, kaj certe estas neperfekta.
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I can't reply to other comments from my phone, but it is often used in Hebrew, too - נו, אף אחד לא מושלם
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I learned Esperanto partly using the "Jen nia mondo" radio series from the 70's, and I understood "nu" to be the equivalent of "so..." at the start of a sentence, but this is not accepted. Since Duo does accept "well..." and "now...", but not "so..." I was wondering if there is any reason to do with Esperanto, or to do with American English (I have been caught out by americanisms before here). In English English we use so, well, and now pretty much interchangeably.
