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[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I am going to guess that the word is "wa" meaning water. Am I right?

Nope. The word was invented by a group of upper middle class school boys in Boston at the turn of the century (1800 to 1900). In their class, the teacher would read a list of questions and the boys wrote the answers down.

Then they had to hand their answers to the student in the next row and the teacher would read the correct answers. If the student got it all correct, the boy grading the paper was supposed to write AC, meaning All Correct on the top of the page but these boys liked to pretend they were immigrants and would write OK on the top

[GA Russell]

Mickey, Martin Van Buren was called OK for Old Kinderhook in the 1830's.

Did it take that much longer for OK to catch on?

[MickeyC]

Guess so. But it sure caught on. I've heard it used in numerous countries in Europe, the Far East, South America.

Read the Bryson book and you'll learn very interesting things about the English language. For example, a battle raged in Britain after the French invaded in 1066 over whether to form the plural by adding the letters en as the German language does or the letter s as the French do

According to Bryson, the countryside favored the s and they won. But there are still several words in English we form the plural by adding the letters en. Three of them you use every day

[TrevorViking]

Originally Posted by MickeyC

But there are still several words in English we form the plural by adding the letters en. Three of them you use every day

Spoiler:

Many of us learned these as children, but I imagine most men and women have forgotten.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by MickeyC

Guess so. But it sure caught on. I've heard it used in numerous countries in Europe, the Far East, South America.

Read the Bryson book and you'll learn very interesting things about the English language. For example, a battle raged in Britain after the French invaded in 1066 over whether to form the plural by adding the letters en as the German language does or the letter s as the French do

According to Bryson, the countryside favored the s and they won. But there are still several words in English we form the plural by adding the letters en. Three of them you use every day

Tolkien of course changed the standard plural of 'dwarf' all on his own.

Apparently (Pinker IIRC) more words is German use -s than any other method. Not a majority though.

Bryson is a good journalist, not a scholar. so his propagation of Yet Another Theory of the origin of OK means little.

He also isn't all that good on research, hence his fun book on Australia in which he walks round the Commonwealth Senate building in complete ignorance of the Dismissal.

[MickeyC]

And if laughter is pronounced latfter why isn't daughter pronounced dafter?

[Froide]

Originally Posted by TrevorViking

Spoiler:

Many of us learned these as children, but I imagine most men and women have forgotten.

Clever!

Originally Posted by MickeyC

And if laughter is pronounced latfter why isn't daughter pronounced dafter?

And, in that vein, if daughter is pronounced "dawter", then why isn't water spelled "waughter"?

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

Mickey, Martin Van Buren was called OK for Old Kinderhook in the 1830's.

Did it take that much longer for OK to catch on?

Then how did the word "okay" originate? I have been under the impression (doesn't mean that I was correct, of course) that "O.K." was short for "okay."

[GtrsRGr8]

The answer to your pronunciation (and here's another question: why is the verb spelled "pronounce," but the noun drops the second "o," making it "pronunciation"?) questions is that English is a mongrel language, much like the people of the British Island are (and Americans are much, much more so)? The Island was invaded by a bunch of different ethnic groups like, let's see . . . the Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the French (Normans), et al. Oh, and there is the group of uninvited guests that you may have heard of called the Romans, speaking their Latin . . . . We've even picked up at least one thing from the Mongols of east Asia, with whom we've historically had very little contact--the "ith" ending of a few English words!

It is that mixture of languages, which went into creating modern English, that creates the irregularity in spelling, different formation of verb tenses, different ways of creating the plural, etc. I genuinely pity the person for whom English is not their native language, and they have to learn it! And, although I am very glad for it, English has become the lingua franca of the world. It would make much better sense to use, for example, French (see paragraph below). In fact, as recently as when I went to high school, French was probably about as close to an international language as any, and my father encouraged me to chose French to take in high school, rather than Spanish, German, and maybe one other language that we had an option of taking, for that very reason).

I've studied French and Greek. Both of them are what I'll call "clean" languages. With few exceptions, the spellings are regular, the tenses of verbs are created the same way each time, etc. It's almost easy to learn them (Greek less so than French, but you've got an almost completely different alphabet to deal with there, for one thing). But neither France nor Greece had much in the way of foreign immigration or occupation over, say, the last two thousand five hundred years or so (when the Roman empire invaded, and occupied what is called Greece today, they basically just largely added the entire Greek language to their culture, making many people across the empire both Latin and Greek speakers and/or writers).

Lesson over. Time to go to your next class. ha

[GA Russell]

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[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Then how did the word "okay" originate? I have been under the impression (doesn't mean that I was correct, of course) that "O.K." was short for "okay."

Not OK.

Okay doesn't turn up until 1895, the OED just has it as a different form (transliteration).

[GA Russell]

Back in the '20s and '30s there was a record label called Okeh. Any idea how popular this spelling was, and when it faded away?

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[bfisher]

Okeh recorded some of the great early jazz artists. It was founded by Otto K. E. Heinemann

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by bfisher

Okeh recorded some of the great early jazz artists. It was founded by Otto K. E. Heinemann

Okeh. I mean . . . O.K. . . . Er . . . Okay . . . . Oh, nevermind.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by bfisher

Okeh recorded some of the great early jazz artists. It was founded by Otto K. E. Heinemann

bf, Sony has resurrected the OKeh label for the adult jazz market with musicians such as Sonny Rollins and Sergio Mendes.

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