LL-L "Etymology" 2009.10.19 (05) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 19 October 2009 - Volume 05
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Lexicon" 2009.10.18 (02) [EN]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
 > Subject: Lexicon
>
> It is certainly not true to say that “basic,” “small” words are not
> adopted from one language to another.

> Are there opinions and information among you that might shed
> additional light onto this?

I remember reading on this very list that "yes" in English is from the
Welsh "oes".

Could it even be that "yeah" and "yes" have different etymologies, from
"ja" and "oes"?

For the Anglo-Saxon dialects of Britain I guess there's an interesting
study in the words for "yes":

"yes"
"yeah"
"ay" (Scotland and north of England)
"ah" (south west of England).

Is the use of "yah" in British English an affectation?

Where do such expressions as "mm-hm" and "uh-hu" come from?

I wonder if basic words tend to get borrowed if they fill some sort of
logical vacuum in the language? Not all languages have simple words for
such seeming basics in English as "yes", "if" and "do". If a language
with a more tortuous, contextual or intonational way of expressing these
ideas comes into contact with such words, do they tend to get borrowed?

It seems to me that the word "if" evolved within English. Shakespeare
seems to have used "and" quite a lot where we would now use "if" (Burns
uses it when writing reported, as opposed to literary, Scots too), while
"if" seems to have evolved from "given that" > "gif" > "if".

"If" is "os" in Welsh, I think, but it seems to me that the word isn't
actually used much in speech, while in Appalachian it seems to me that
"if" is often omitted and the conditional implied by intonation or
rhythm. BSL also expresses "if" in the Appalachian way, although there
is a tendency to borrow the word as a fingerspelling from English or as
a sign from ASL (both of which I studiously resist :)

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
 Subject: Lexicon

Hi, Sandy! Interesting!

I always assumed that "if" was a Germanic word, and the *Oxford English
Dictionary* seems to agree:

[OE. *ƽ**if *(early WS. rare *ƽ**ief*), late WS. *ƽ**yf* (Northumbr. rare *ƽ
**ef*), corresp. (more or less) to OFris. *ief*, *gef*, *ef* (*jof*, *of*),
OS. *ef* (*of*) (MLG. *jof*, MDu. *jof*, *of*, Du. *of*) ‘if’, OHG. *ibu* (*
oba*, *ubi*), MHG. *obe*, *ob*, Ger. *ob* ‘whether, if’, ON. *ef* ‘if’,
Goth. *ibai* ‘whether, lest’, *jabai* ‘if, even if, although’. The phonetic
relations of the various forms. and their OTeut. type or types, have not
been satisfactorily determined. By many considered to represent one or more
cases of the n. represented by OHG. *iba* str. f., ‘condition, stipulation,
doubt’, ON. *if*, *ef* neut., *ifi*, *efi* wk. masc., ‘doubt, hesitation’
(whence *ifa*, *efa* vb. ‘to doubt’, Sw. *jäf* ‘exception, challenge’, *
jäfva* ‘to make an exception against, to challenge’), the conj. thus meaning
originally ‘on condition’, ‘on the stipulation (that)’; but it has not been
certainly determined whether the conj. is thus derived from the n., or the
n. founded on the conj. A notable point in ME. is the development of the
northern form GIF, q.v.]

Modern Low Saxon has *of*, in some dialects *ob*.

In German and Low Saxon you can use it in the sense of for instance "I don't
know *if* this is enough." You can not use it in the sense of for instance
"I'll get sick *if** *I eat hazelnuts," in which case you'd use *wenn* (or *
falls* in elevated German).

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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