Re: OT: English and front rounded vowels

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> While on the topic of English differences from common Germanic themes, where
> the heck does "yes" come from?  I assume it's cognate with "ja", but whence
> the -s?  The only place I've seen a similar form is Esperanto, which of
> course doesn't count since it was taken from English...
Old English ge:se < ge:a-si, where "ge:a" --- meaning "so" --- continues
*ja and is continued by "yea", and "si" is an imperative of "to be"; the
whole thing means "so be it". IIRC, in OE/ME ge:a/yea was a neutral
"yes", whereas ge:se/yes affirmed negative questions. (The colons
represent phonological length, but don't correspond to anything in the
OE orthography. In OE, <g>=/j/ before front vowels. <e:a> = /&:a/ and
isn't anything particularly strange because OE usually fronted Germanic
/a/.)

The modern "yeah" is obviously another variant of "yes", although quite
how it comes about I don't know. IIRC in American English it's something
like /j&/ making it phonologically quite strange, whereas for non-rhotic
speakers it rhymes with "fair" (I have /je:, fe:/).

I would not be surprised if the modern "yay" was just another
representative of ME "yea" and therefore we have four different
continuations of *ja: yea (archaic), yes, yay (interjection), yeah
(informal).

--
Tristan.