Yes or No

The wordgese(withgpronounced asy) has existed since the days of Old English.Noah Websterknew it but said nothing about its origin. Later etymologists did not doubt thatgeseis a combination ofgeandse, withgebeing preserved in the modern wordyeaand cognate with Dutch and Germanja, Old Norsejá, and Gothicja~jai. Thes-part remains in limbo. It may be the stump ofswa“so” or ofsie, the present subjunctive of the Old English verbto be. Thus, “yea so” or “yea, be it.” Some dictionaries favor the first variant, others the second. The most circumspect ones sit on the fence, and we will join them there.Words meaning “yes” often go back to demonstrative pronouns; such are, for instance, Slavicdaand Romancesi. They tend to be short and to have multiple variants. Even Biblical Gothic, the only extant version of that fourth-century Germanic language, had, as we have seen,jaandjai. The Old Celtic and Germanic forms sounded nearly the same and were related: neither Germanic borrowed them from Celtic nor Celtic from Germanic. Perhaps, as etymological dictionaries say, Proto-Germanic had bothjaandje, but there could be more. Only crumbs of old slang and conversational usage have come down to us. The hardest question about their history is just variation, so typical of emphatic words and interjections. English has retained its oldest word for “yes” in the form spelled asyea, but it rhymes withnayand may owe its pronunciation to the Scandinavian borrowingnay(the negationne+ey“ay”).Will you marry me? YES!As mentioned in theolder post, language historians tried but failed to deriveayefromyeabecause the vowels do not match andayehas noy-. The second difficulty can perhaps be explained away. For no known reason, initialy– sometimes disappeared in English words. The oldest form ofifwasgif(pronounced asyif). Likewise,itchbegan withg-(=y): compare Dutchjeukenand Germanjucken. Less clear is the history of –ickle(Old Engl.gicel) inicicle. Its cognate is Icelandicjökull“glacier”; in the middle of a compound, the argument goes,jcould be lost without anybody’s noticing it. This also happened in some Scandinavian languages. But as though to mock us, in one case Old Norse preserved initialj– in the position in which it was supposed to lose it. Compare GermanJahr“year” and Icelandicár. This is a regular correspondence: initialjhas been dropped before a vowel. However,jáhas not becomeá.Having disposed ofj-, we wonder what to do with the vowels. Let me repeat: a word foryesoryes indeedoccurred as an emphatic formula of affirmation, and a good deal in its life cycle depended on the rise and fall of the speaker’s voice. Wilhelm Horn, an outstanding German scholar (1876-1952), based many of his historical hypotheses on the caprices of intonation. In this he had few followers, for the intonation of past epochs is nearly impossible to reconstruct, but his opinions are worth knowing.Both professionals and lay people have paid attention to the forms ofyeain British dialects and especially American English. We findyeahapproximately with a diphthong as inear,yah(known from Lancashire to North America),eh-yuh(pronounced asei–ya), andayuh, the latter recorded in Maine and elsewhere in New England. Languages are most inventive when it comes to coining expressive words. For instance, the Swedish for “yes” isja, but, to disagree with a negative statement, one saysju(“he won’t come”—“oh, yes, he will” [Ju!]); analogs of theja ~ judifference exist elsewhere in the Scandinavian area. The Russian for “already” isuzhe. This word, when it acquires threatening connotations, sounds asuzho(stress falls on the final syllables). Similar, often inexplicable, changes happen in humorous variants, as in Engl.brollyforumbrellaandfroshforfreshman.We should not underrate the so-calledludicfunction of language: people like to play, and wordplay is among the greatest amusements there is. Couldaye, a homophone ofI, come into being as an emphatic variant ofyeain contexts like: “You will do it, won’t you?”—“I, I!” (not a new idea)? That we will never know, but etymologists, predictably, shy away from vague suggestions, to save themselves from wild conjectures; however, such a possibility cannot be excluded. But one loses heart after discovering that the Korean for “yes” is alsoye. Are we dealing with some near-universal interjection of assent?As long as we are on the subject of emphasis, it may be useful to rememberyepandnope(mainly but not exclusively American). The obvious things about them have been said more than once. While pronouncing such words, we are told, people sometimes articulate sounds very forcefully, that is, they close the mouth so energetically that some sort of finalpis heard. This is not much of an explanation, but there is no better one. Scandinavian scholars, including the greatest among them (Axel Kock, Marius Kristensen, and Otto Jespersen) were especially intrigued byyepandnope, because Danish makes wide use of the so-calledglottal stop, but even they were unable to come up with a more profound explanation. The fact that a Swiss German interjection once also ended inpdoes not take us much further.Aye, aye, Sir.As was noted in thepost onaye, this English word has a Frisian congener sounding exactly as in English, but I expressed some doubt about the borrowing of it from Frisian. Also, I cited the opinion thatayecould come to English from nautical usage, as suggested by the formula “Aye, aye, Sir,” and referred to two researchers: Hermann Flasdieck and Rolf Bremmer. My half-baked reconstruction resolves itself into the following. Among the rather numerous variants of the wordyeah, the variantaye(that is,iorI) developed among British sailors and became part of international nautical slang. Later, landlubbers in Frisia and Britain began to use it too. This process must have taken place some time before 1500; Bremmer’s earliest Frisian citation dates back to 1507.By way of conclusion, I’ll again cite an example from Slavic. The Russian for “aye, aye, Sir” isest’!(a homonym of the third person singular of the verbto be: Engl.is, Germanist, Latinest, and so forth). It has been suggested that thisest’!is a slightly modified borrowing of Engl.yes, Sir. This etymology has been contested, but, if it is true, we have a curious example of the spread of nautical formulas in northern Europe. Russianest’!is not limited to the language of sailors.