South Dakotan 'yet'

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:49 PM -0500 1/11/01, Mai Kuha wrote:
>Actually, I just realized it was "Next month, even." Sorry.
>mk
>On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Mai Kuha wrote:
>
>>  This one may not fit any of the previously mentioned uses: while I was
>>  living in Bloomington, IN, a vet asked while examining my cat:  "How old
>>  is she?" "10 next month," I answered. "Next month, yet," he said.  I
>>  thought that meant he was impressed that I knew my cat's exact age.
>>
>>  -Mai
>>

and

At 4:55 PM -0500 1/11/01, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>
>>"Is that a bottle of gin yet?"
>
>Seems odd to me; I would take the "yet" here as the 'ironic intensive'
>sentence termination (I think supposedly based on Yiddish "noch"?) -- maybe
>roughly = "after all".
>

I was going to say that Mai's vet's "yet" sounded Yiddish to me, and
indeed it does, in exactly the sense Doug nicely captures ('ironic
intensive'), and I was also going to say it's closer to 'even' in
this sense than to either the standard "yet" or the Midwestern
'still' "yet".  ("noch" is indeed a better fit than 'even', in fact.)
I'll still say it, even though it's really Mai's "yet" rather than
Mai's vet's "yet".  I'm sure if she tried some vets in Brooklyn (NY,
not Iowa), she'd catch some "Next month, yet!"s.

larry