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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Origin of Uh-huh?
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References: <Z7Jvh7u.stgriffin@delphi.com> <4nkem9$rg5@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 05:40:14 GMT
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In article <4nkem9$rg5@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com>,
Jack Wright  <jackwrgt@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>In <Z7Jvh7u.stgriffin@delphi.com> Steve Griffin <stgriffin@delphi.com>
>writes: 
>>
>>Is there anyone on the net who can comment as to the origin of the
>habit we
>>English-speaking Americans have of saying "uh-huh" in the affirmative
>and
>>"uhnt-uh" in the negative? Is it done in other English speaking
>countries?
>>Has any etymology been done on this?
>> 
>>Steve Griffin    stgriffin@delphi.com     steve.griffin@accessil.com
>  
>  I've seen these usually spelled "uh-huh" <affirmative> and "huh-uh"  
><negative>. I have read an argument somewhere that they came into our
>American form of English from the Niger-Congo language Wolof. I leave
>the etymology to the professional linguists who inhabit this newsgroup.
>It would be interesting to see if the expressions can be traced back to
>the former institution of slavery in this country. One would suppose
>that as a language characteristic it would spread around the world with
>the movies and television ...

	This sounds *so* unlikely.  Certainly, there are American words
with African etymologies (like gumbo and goober), but these are very, 
very few in number.  

	I knew a linguistics professor who was fond of saying that slang
words "had no etymologies".  What he meant by this was that the etymolo-
gies of a great number of words which first appear in highly colloquial
contexts (even ones which later become acceptable at all levels, like
English "boy") are hopelessly obscure and likely to remain so.

	The same thing could be said, in general, of interjections.
Certainly there are some (like "hurray!" or "alas!") that can be traced,
but most are probably onomatopoetic in origin.  That doesn't mean they
aren't language-specific (as far as I know, only English- and German- 
speakers use /autS/, although both seem to prefer the more spontaneous
/au/; I've heard /aigo/ from both Twi and Korean speakers, but Chinese
speakers--Mandarin and Cantonese--use /aija/, which in at least one dia-
lect of English is a particle of assertion, etc.) or that they don't have 
histories of tranmission ("phooey!"was borrowed from German; why they
should use the sequence [pfuI] to express disapproval, though, is 
anyone's guess), but it does mean that asking for the original "meaning" 
of ep! or yikes! or wei/wai! is probably futile.

	The less an exclamation resembles members of the "regular"
lexicon, the more like it is that it has no traceable origin.  Uh huh
([!~@h~@!] in many transcriptions) consists almost entirely of phones
that have no phonemic status in English.  In fact, they are not even 
common allophones (the glottal stop--[!]--shows up occasionally, 
sometimes replacing a stop, sometimes word-initially or in hiatus (it
might even be arguably phonemic in some dialects), but nasalised vowels 
are very infrequent in English).  Like the click of disapproval (generally 
written <tsk! tsk!>; I forget its IPA transcription) in English, this 
could be considered "paralinguistic".  Like a sob or a gasp, it is a 
vocalisation with definite meaning, but probably not a "word" in the 
formal sense.  (Lest one argue that sobs and gasps are universal whilst 
"uh huh" is not, keep in mind that the connotations of a sob or a gasp 
are hardly the same from culture to culture.)


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
