Wolof hip

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated   Sat, 27 Nov 2004 02:58:43 -0500,  Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> quotes:

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

This one particular Dalby suggestion seems plausible for the following reason:
"negative uh-uh" (which for clarity I will spell "unh-uh") in English has a
glottal stop.  The only other word in English that I know of that has a glottal
stop is "uh-oh", also an interjection.  It seems odd that English should have
exactly two vocabulary items with a phonological feature (the glottal stop)
not found in European languages.

But if Wolof is full of words with glottal stops, it would make sense that
two such words might enter American English complete with the unusual (to
English-speakers) glottal stop.

How would the interjections "uh-oh", "uh-uh", and "unh-uh" make the jump from
slaves recently imported from Africa to the white population?  Simple.  In
the Southern United States it was quite common for young white children to be
raised by, or at least to be in frequent contact with, African-American females,
i.e. house slaves before the Civil War and "mammies" after the Civil War.
Social pressure and prescriptivist school-marms would cause these white children
to lose any obvious features of AAVE that they would have picked up from
these black servants, but the trio of interjections "uh-oh", "uh-uh", and "unh-uh"
might easily have slipped beneath the prescriptivist radar.  (Note the
surprisingly late dates in MWCD11 for these interjections).

Aside on the subject of "brogue"---I was not saying anyone was wrong, I was
merely pointing out that I personally had never heard "brogue" used except to
designate an Irish accent.  I should, however, have noted that if "brogue"
meant exclusively an Irish dialect, it would be spelled "Brogue".

MWCD11 says that "brogue" is from Irish "barrog" and means "a dialect or
regional pronunciaton, esp: an Irish accent" so all of us are correct.

    - James A. Landau