[Ads-l] Antedating of "Yeah"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I can't argue with the spelling, but there's a complication.

"Yeh! Yeh! [sic]" appears frequently in mid-nineteenth-century
representations of AAVE, but after a while I realized it wasn't "Yeah!
Yeah!"

It was "Heh! Heh!"

Ex.:

1850 Daily Picayune (N.O.) (Feb. 14) 1 [G] : Ringing loud above the
din came a regular "_yeah, yeah, yeah whooah!_ from the darkest of the
colored party in the box.  It was...the clearest, deepest, loudest,
heartiest laugh perhaps ever heard.

Not to say Fred's ex. isn't legit, but what we really need is an ex.
where "Yeah!" or "Yeh!" or "Yea!" or even "Yah!" is clearly an
affirmative reply.

JL

On Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 9:06 PM Shapiro, Fred
<00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> yeah (OED 1863)
>
> 1862 Weekly Vincennes (Indiana) Sun 29 Nov. 2/3 (Newspapers.com)
>
> An old darkey acting as cook in this company ... shakes his wooly head ominously when the big guns thunder and says. ... ["] Stonewall has a smart chance ob men ober der — whar will dis ole niggur be found den ? ... dats Sartin.  Yeah1 Yeah !"
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org