"yeah, yeah" again (another version)

[Jonathan Lighter]

That's the Yiddish inflection in "jah, jah!"

JL

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "yeah, yeah" again (another version)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Jah, Jah!
>
>      VS-)
>
> On 7/21/2012 2:01 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> > Where's the Yiddish inflection in "Yeah, yeah"?
> >
> > JL
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu
> >wrote:
> >
> >> On Jul 21, 2012, at 12:25 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >>
> >>> Garson O'Toole wrote, quoting from an MIT Press book:
> >>>> the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, shout from the back of the room
> >>>> in rich Yiddish: "Yeah, yeah?"
> >>> What is the rich Yiddish?  I want to employ it when appropriate, with
> >>> varying intonations as appropriate.
> >>>
> >> Well, in the possible (but not actual world) in which Chomsky spoke at
> >> some (possible but not actual) talk about double negation at Columbia
> >> (extremely unlikely), Morgenbesser's putative comeback was, I think,
> >> supposed to be in rich Yiddish-inflected English rather than Yiddish,
> but
> >> youneverknow.  I'm not sure what the Yinglish is for "Yeah, yeah";
> maybe it
> >> just comes out in the inflection and the eyebrows.  Probably similar to
> the
> >> rich Yiddish-inflected Danish that Morgenbesser used when Otto Jespersen
> >> was talking about double negation at a public lecture sometime in the
> 1930s.
> >>
> >> LH
>
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