![]() ![]() The Old Celtic and Germanic forms sounded nearly the same and were related: neither Germanic borrowed them from Celtic nor Celtic from Germanic. Even Biblical Gothic, the only extant version of that fourth-century Germanic language, had, as we have seen, ja and jai. They tend to be short and to have multiple variants. Words meaning “yes” often go back to demonstrative pronouns such are, for instance, Slavic da and Romance si. The most circumspect ones sit on the fence, and we will join them there. Thus, “yea so” or “yea, be it.” Some dictionaries favor the first variant, others the second. It may be the stump of swa “so” or of sie, the present subjunctive of the Old English verb to be. Later etymologists did not doubt that gese is a combination of ge and se, with ge being preserved in the modern word yea and cognate with Dutch and German ja, Old Norse já, and Gothic ja ~ jai. ![]() Noah Webster knew it but said nothing about its origin. The word gese (with g pronounced as y) has existed since the days of Old English. Etymology has always attracted more or less peaceful maniacs, and they usually had the same tempting idea, namely that all words of all languages have a single source or go back to a small number of monosyllabic roots. own ( Horne Tooke derived hundreds of English words from imperatives), or from Irish Gaelic (tracing the bulk of the English vocabulary to Gaelic was John Mackay’s hobby). We may ignore the fanciful suggestions that connected yes with the imperative of Old Engl. Two weeks ago, I discussed the troubled origin of the word aye “yes,” as in the ayes have it, and promised to return to this word in connection with some other formulas of affirmation.
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