title_body: Maximizing the distinction between affirmative and negative sentences What are some strategies for making affirmative and negative sentences as distinct as possible?
  The motivation for this question is an annoying pair of words in English: can and can't. They frequently sound very similar in rapid speech.
  There's also one attested language, Wyandot, described here, that appears to lack dedicated negative morphemes and instead has an irrealis and a contrastive morpheme that can convey negation in certain contexts but don't have to.
  If you wanted to do the opposite and maximize the contrast between afifrmative and negative sentences, what are some strategies for doing so?
upvoted_answer: To maximize, it seems like at least you'd want to associate negation with:
  
  independent words
  conjugation/declension
  your loudest phonemes
  distinct word order
  distinct prosody
  
  You could have a number of independent markers/words as mentioned above.
  Turkish has verbs which always negate, and Turkish verbs usually end the thought: e.g., 'değil' for &quot;is not [noun or adjective]&quot;; 'yok' for 'there is not [something].' For negating verbs, it has an infix as part of the conjugation. Reflecting back your point about 'can't,' as a non-native speaker, I can miss this negative infix sometimes. This, even though it is higher on the sonority hierarchy (easier to hear) than the plosive T you point out in 'can't.' (It uses M and a variable vowel.)
  So, if you wanted to change a conjugation to express &quot;not,&quot; say, instead of a T or even an M, you could try using the loudest sounds in your set (usually wide-mouthed vowels?), ha ha.
  You could change word order for negated sentences. We do that for questions. I have noticed. Have you noticed? [rhetorical ;) ]
  Also, you could reserve a certain, unusual tone, pitch, stress pattern, etc., for negating, like how it's pretty easy to hear the lilt we put at the end of a question? Not that this is exclusive of the other options, but imagine to say, &quot;You can't have a muffin,&quot; you deepen your voice as much as you can and borderline-sing, &quot;You can have a muffin.&quot; If people associated deep voice with negation like we associate that rising tone with questions, that'd be pretty hard to miss.