Re: Fr/lat/ru tu-vous/tu-vos/ты-вы: etymology ?

On Sep 26, 10:47 am, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 26, 3:00 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You claimed that the Americanism "okay" is Magdalenian.

What I claim is this: Magdalenian OC means right eye,
Magdalenian AY means left eye, a firm look into each
other's eyes was the Magdalenian way of saying yes,
and the words for it were OC AY. The eye aspect of
this early 'yes' survived in occulus occhio for eye,
and in eye itself. The yes aspect of this compound
survived in Occitanian oc for yes, and in aye aye
for yes. The ego aspect survived in Latin ego and
in English I (pronounced like aye or eye). The
Magdalenian OC AY would have survived in Scottish
och, aye, a rather fatalistic affirmation, 'oh, it is so,
alas' (if I understand the exlamation properly), and
it would have survived in Choctaw okeh 'it is so'.

None of that speculation has anything to do with the facts of the
origin of the Americanism "okay."

When an American president (was it Truman?)

What does poor Harry Truman have to do with it,

was asked where the affirmation okay comes from,

and why would anyone have asked him a question of etymology?

he mentioned the Choctaws. I assume okay is
a derivative of Scottish och, aye, that must have
come to the USA with the many poor Scottish
who were shipped over the Atlantic ocean and
labored in America.

But your assumption is simply wrong.

But as both och, aye, and
Choctaw okeh have the same meaning of an
affirmation, they might both go back to hypothetical
Magdalenian OC AY 'right eye, left eye', testifying
to an early time when a firm look into each other's
eyes was a yes and sealed a contract. This
compound would have survived in the remote
Scottish highland, and it would have traveled
to North America by the end of the Magdalenian,
and then, some hundred years ago, the two
sparated traditions would have united in the
famous okay given as OK. That's a far more
detailed explanation than your mocking line
suggests. Okay?

It is not an explanation, it is a groundless speculation. The
etymology of "okay" was practically a lifetime obsession of one of the
great American Anglists of the 20th century, Allan Walker Read; he
published on it several times during his very long career. (The most
accessible account of his quest is in a New Yorker profile, probably
from the 1980s -- I didn't meet him until 1993.)

Two rather improbable fads and a nickname converged in the 1830s to
give rise to the word. There was a fad for "phonetic" respellings of
folksy expressions, and <oll korrekt> was used for <all correct>.
There was a fad for reducing phrases to initials, and "Oll Korrekt"
became <O.K.>. And a hack politician, Martin Van Buren, ran for
president, and his nickname (from his home town in Upstate New York)
was "Old Kinderhook." which also fed into "O.K." This was eventually
respelled more genteelly as <okay>.

No Magdalenians, no Scotsmen (Van Buren, obviously, was of Dutch
ancestry, and the Hudson River Valley was still thickly settled with
Dutch-Americans, and also with Huguenots, who of course could not come
to New France in the 17th century), no Choctaws. (They were among the
Southeastern Indians who were relocated by Andrew Jackson, Van Buren's
predecessor, and it's unlikely that an item of Choctaw vocabulary
would have entered American English around that time.)

.

Relevant Pages