[lit-ideas] "If you axes me" -- and other biscuit conditionals
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:31:10 EDT
R. Ritchie writes:
>To me the most interesting examples considered in the piece >involved what
I thought was an African-Americanism transposition, >"axe" for "ask".
whereas indeed the transposition (or metathesis, as linguists prefer) is
'axe'. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon (Old English) had _both_ forms, 'aksian' and
'askian', but you _have_ to admit that 'aksian' rolls better in the tongues of
the
Angles, while there's something very Viking to the sound of 'askian'. (Etym.
from the OED below)
One line of a song I _love_ to sing and play on the piano is music by
Sterndale Bennett and lyrics by A. Wright (Edwardian Drawing-Room Ballad
Album). I
don't know why Boosey thinks it's an Edwardian favorite when it was written in
1928! Anyway, the lyrics, which I take as "Appalachian" or
"African-American" -- I read Wright was a minstrel singer from Boston --: go:
but if you axes me
the things that soots a fella
Is a little bit of straw to suck
to keep the fancies mella...
Incidentally, "if you axes me" is what J. L. Austin called a "biscuit
conditional" ("If you are hungry there are biscuits in the cupboard" cfr. "If
you
axes me, the thing that soots a fellow is a li'l bi? of straw".
Cheers,
JL
[Common Teut.: OE. áscian was cogn. w. OFris. âskia, OS. êscôn, êscan, OHG.
eiscôn, MHG. eischen, Ger. heischen, OTeut. *aiskôjan: cf. Skr. ish to seek,
<NOBR> wish. The original long á gave regularly the ME. (Kentish) xi; but
elsewhere was shortened before the two consonants, giving ME. a, and, in some
dialects, e. The result of these vowel changes, and of the OE. metathesis
asc-, acs-, was that ME. had the types x, ax, ex, ask, esk, ash, esh, ass,
ess.
The true representative of the orig. áscian was the s.w. and w.midl. ash,
esh, also written esse (cf. æsce _ASH_
(http://0-dictionary.oed.com.csulib.ctstateu.edu/cgi/crossref?query_type=word&queryword=ask&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_
type=alpha&search_id=MuOy-wpwdlO-17460&result_place=3&xrefword=ash) ,
wæsc(e)an _WASH_
(http://0-dictionary.oed.com.csulib.ctstateu.edu/cgi/crossref?query_type=word&queryword=ask&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&search_id=MuOy-
wpwdlO-17460&result_place=3&xrefword=wash) ), now quite lost. Acsian, axian,
survived in ax, down to nearly 1600 the regular literary form, and still
used everywhere in midl. and south. dialects, though supplanted in standard
English by ask, originally the northern form. Already in 15th c. the latter
was
reduced dialectally to asse, pa. tense ast, still current dialectally.]
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