Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2008

On Feb 24, 7:20�pm, "Daniel P. B. Smith" <see-my-sig-
ple...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I believe it started with "Do you take this man...for better or for
worse...etc" then with "Do you swear to tell the truth...?"

My housemate once told me that I did this. It must've been in 1996,
thereabouts. At the time I remembered a different roommate mentioning
that her father did it -- that conversation must've been about ten years
earlier.

On Feb 24, 5:20 pm, "Daniel P. B. Smith" <see-my-sig-
ple...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I have.  In fact, I'm a participant in it.  I still say "Yes" and
"Yep" at times, though.

The way I say it, I'd write it with a period, not an exclamation
point.

Probably not, though for all I know it could be from /Fast Times at
Ridgemont High/ or something.

--
Jerry Friedman

On Feb 25, 10:20 am, "Daniel P. B. Smith" <see-my-sig-
ple...@hotmail.com> wrote:

"Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?" "Yes".

I think it indicates a more active engagement with the question, by
echoing the person's questions.

"Did you..." "I did"
"Have you..." "I have"

===
= DUG.
===

Yes.

They have.

Some languages have no words for "yes" and "no."  I seem to recall that
Chinese is one of those languages... if someone asks you a question, you
just repeat the verb to mean "yes."  E.g.,

Q. Do you have money?
A. Have.  (Or "not have," which I guess means "no.")

But I doubt that this would influence the trend you are observing in
English.  :)

Yes, it's something I say and hear from others fairly often; often
enough that it is unremarkable to me.

There is another, probably related answer that I hear occasionally.

Q: "Did you go to the dance?"
A: "I did so"

Q: "Would you go to a dance again?"
A: "I would so"

I purposely left off the punctuation in the answer, because the tone I
hear is not exclamatory, nor simply declarative.

Daniel P. B. Smith wrote, in
<see-my-sig-please-39BE47.19200224022008@news.verizon.net>
on Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:20:07 GMT:

Nothing newfangled about it.  I have done it myself as long as I can
remember.

Pádraig Breathnach once pointed out to me that Irish people rarely
answer a question with "yes" or "no". The words apparently don't exist
in Irish, and this has somehow influenced how people speak English.

There seems to be a general phenomenon in languages whereby some
redundancy is added perhaps originally as emphasis to make sure
the hearer understands what is being said, and then conventionally as
a necessary grammatical part because the thing which originally signified
the meaning has become so short that it is easily missed.

Consider the French "ne ... pas" to form the negative. Originally,
"ne" meant "not" and was enough to negate, and "pas" meant "step"
so "ne ... pas" means literally "not ... a step", which emphasises
the "not". But that little "ne" is easily missed, particularly with
it becoming just "n'" in front of vowels and it does not do for a "not"
to go unheard, so the "pas" (and a few other words, "ne ... rien" and the
like) became compulsory.

Maybe this is what is happening here, "yes" just isn't enough, so to
make sure it is heard and the speaker can't be accused of mumbling or
of lacking commitment by being monosyllabic, something longer has to be
said. In other cases, "please" has to be added after "yes" and "thanks"
after "no", again redundant but emphasises and is considered polite.

The tendency for "have got" forms to be used in the place of "have"
forms in current English is probably also an example of this phenomenon
of languages becoming more complex grammatically through the addition of
redundancies in order to emphasise.

Matthew Huntbach

On Feb 25, 2:20 am, "Daniel P. B. Smith" <see-my-sig-
ple...@hotmail.com> wrote:

All this theorising about the absence or otherwise of yes and no in
different languages is interesting but the original question was
incorrect in its assumption that the word to indicate 'yes' should be
written as the first person singular pronoun. This usage has nothing
to do with verbs. The correct spelling of the word is 'Aye' or 'ay',
and it means yes. It is rather an archaic way of saying it but it is
still commonly used in Northern and western parts of the British
Isles. It appears in Shakespear (consider the middle of Hamlet's 'To
be or not to be' solliloquy - "Aye, there's the rub"). It is also used
in the British parliament. When members of parliament vote on a
particular law, they go through one of two doors into a division
chamber: one marked 'Aye' (if they think the law should pass) the
other 'No' (if they don't). After counting the people in the division
chambers the speaker of the house declares 'the Ayes (or Noes) have
it' depending on which chamber contains the most people.

It's interesting that this is something that is apparently crossing
the pond from the UK to the US, and not the other way round as more
commonly seen.