Biloxi/Ofo

[Pamela Munro]

I was not suggesting I thought "okay" was from the Choctaw suffix, just
that you will find that in dictionaries.

If the OED has "okii", they are probably quoting someone else who works
on Choctaw, and that is a possibly phonemicization, though not the one I
would go for, because of the phonetic problems I mentioned. It is
certainly NOT Choctaw /o:ke:/, because there is no phonemic /e:/ in
Choctaw -- it's simply a matter of deciding what the best
phonemicization is here. Leaving off the h is fine (the h is certainly a
separate morpheme, but people (Chickasaws and Choctaws) include the h
when they refer to this form, so that's how I think of it (I regard it
as a feature of typical Choctaw men's speech, though women use it also).
I would definitely say the o is long myself (I think it is a form of
'be', probably), but maybe that's debatable. As to whether it's a
suffix, that sort of depends on what level of analysis you're referring
to. I think of it that way most of the time, but I could see arguments
for not doing so, so once again, I wouldn't fight what the OED has now.
These are all probably too small problems for anyone to worry about who
is not interested in specifically Western Muskogean problems, and I'm
sorry I bothered you all, but I did want to comment on the point about
Haas and Choctaw [e]. I don't know to what degree the OED really cares
about these debates.

Pam



Alan H. Hartley wrote:

> Pamela Munro wrote:
>
>> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think
>> is a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct
>> (rarely also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which
>> does something like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought
>> by some to be the source for English okay -- this is really in some
>> dictionaries of English!).
>
>
> That's an attractive idea, but it's unsupported in the record of
> English, at least in the OED, where there's no hint of a southeastern
> provenance for the word. In fact, the several earliest examples the
> OED (draft entry in new edition on line) quots are all from the
> northeast:
>
> 1839 C. G. GREENE in Boston Morning Post 23 Mar. 2/2 He..would have
> the 'contribution box', et ceteras, o.k. all correct and cause the
> corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
> 1839 Salem Gaz. 12 Apr. 2/3 The house was O.K. at the last concert,
> and did credit to the musical taste of the young ladies and gents.
> 1839 Boston Evening Transcript 11 Oct. 2/3 Our Bank Directors have not
> thought it worth their while to call a meeting, even for consultation,
> on the subject. It is O.K. (all correct) in this quarter.
> 1840 Atlas (Boston) 19 Aug. 2/4 These initials, according to Jack
> Downing, were first used by Gen. Jackson. ‘Those papers, Amos
> [Kendall], are all correct. I have marked them O.K.’ (oll korrect).
> The Gen. was never good at spelling.
> 1840 Morning Herald (N.Y.) 21 Apr. 2/4 The Brigadier..reviewed his
> Brigade..and pronounced every thing O.K.
>
> The OED etymology espouses the "oll korrect" hypothesis and goes on to
> say "Other suggestions, e.g. that O.K. represents an alleged Choctaw
> word oke 'it is' (actually the affirmative verbal suffix -okii
> ‘indeed, contrary to your supposition’), or French au quai, or
> Scottish English och aye, or that it derives from a word in the West
> African language Wolof via slaves in the southern States of America,
> all lack any form of acceptable documentation." And then "In form okeh
> (as used by Dr. Woodrow Wilson: see quots. 1919, 1939 at sense 1 of
> adjective) on the understanding that the word represents an alleged
> Choctaw word oke (see above)." The 1919 Wilson quot is:
>
> 1919 H. L. MENCKEN Amer. Lang. 161 Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said..to use
> okeh in endorsing government papers.
>
> (I can't find the mentioned 1939 quot anywhere in the entry.)
>
> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is
> it, as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?
>
> Alan H.
>
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm