Wolof hip

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:33:57 -0800, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>I believe it was David Dalby who first made this suggestion about 1967
>or '68.  I also seem to recall that he made clear that it was only a
>suggestion, part of his interest in investigating West African languages
>for possibly overlooked etymologies of English words.  "Jitterbug" was
>also on the list.

I think the original Dalby reference on "hip" et al. was a July 19, 1969
article in the (London) Times.  From Paul Werth on the Linguist List:

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http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-705.html

Date: Mon, 13 Sep 93 16:30 MET
From: <WERTH at alf.let.uva.nl>
Subject: RE: 4.694 Etymology of OK

An expansion on my earlier rather vague note about the attempt to argue
an African origin for O.K. I've managed to find my original source for
the information, which was an article in the London Times of July 19,
1969, by David Dalby (Reader in West African Languages, SOAS, U of London).
There is apparently independent evidence of the importance of Wolof as a
lingua franca among American slaves, and some of the foodstuffs traded
along the West African coast have entered the English vocab as Wolof loans
(Dalby cites banana and yam). There are other examples in this article than
those I cited: 'dig' in the 'understand' or 'appreciate' sense seems like
Wolof 'dega', 'to understand'; 'jive', in its original sense of 'talk
misleadingly' (Don't jive me, man), finds a parallel in Wolof 'jev', 'to
talk disparagingly'; there's a Wolof verb 'hipi', meaning 'to open one's
eyes', which with the agentive verbal suffix 'kat', gives 'hipikat', 'one
whose eyes are open'. And if the explanation of an African origin for
such a quintessential Americanism as OK isn't enough of a cultural shock,
Dalby also suggests that the positive and negative interjections uh-huh
and uh-uh also have an African origin. He says that these kinds of inter-
jections are particularly common in Africa, and points out that not only
are they more common in American English than in British English, they're
also more common in Afrikaans than in European Dutch!
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--Ben Zimmer