[lit-ideas] Re: vocative particles

Mirembe:

>Forgot to ask:

> What troubles me about Mirembe's list of 'English' vocative particles is...<

>Why 'English' rather than just English, O Robert?
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Hai! Mirembe! Because it seemed to me that the examples given although used by
English-speakers were not especially English words. I now wonder if 'Ahoy!' Oy!
are related to the ubiquitous O! (and if so how). Not every word used by
English-speakers is an English word. Sometimes words swim from one live language
to another: noblesse oblige.

Grammar can be prescriptive, but linguistics, one hopes, is descriptive. So it
would not be an a priori truth but an empirical discovery that a word--a
particle--was used vocatively by hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin'
daddies. 

1963 V. NABOKOV Gift iii. 181 His trick of garbling Russian, in imitation of a
farcical Jewish accent as when he said..`Oy, vat a mudnik [sic]!' 

1968 L. ROSTEN Joys of Yiddish 14 Two A[lteren] K[ockern] had sat in silence on
their favorite park bench for hours, lost in thought. Finally, one gave a long
and languid `Oy!' The other replied, `You're telling me?' 

1968 L. ROSTEN Joys of Yiddish 273 Oy is often used as lead-off for `oy vay!'
which means, literally, `Oh, pain', but is used as an all-purpose ejaculation to
express anything from trivial delight to abysmal woe.

Now, is this Oy the Oi of David Ritchie's kinsman? I wouldn't know how to answer
that. If one says Oy! in order to address someone or to get their attention it
seems to me that the speaker's language (as might be revealed by what followed)
is a matter of indifference. Rapping a glass with a spoon after a banquet in
order to get the attention of the assembly is neither English nor non-English.
That it does its vocative job in settings in which the assembly is made up of
English-speakers does not make it one or the other, even though Hey! (allegedly
an English VP) could have been rudely substituted for it. Language is much
cleverer than we make it out to be.

Robert Paul
Reed College



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