RE: OT: O.K. (was How do I say ...)

I'm not sure of the vowel in oc but it's not u it might be sort of U but a 
bit lower;
the hard c is pronounced!
That I am sure of.
(This is from several sources
Langue d'oc
and Langue d'oeil

O.k.

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com
>
>CE Whitehead scripsit:
>
> > (OK. is sort of English/American, but I think a lot of people borrow it,
>
>It has been very widely adopted in the world's languages.
>
> > incidentally 'oc' [pronounced /) k/ a little like /ak/ I do not have the
> > backwords c here] means 'yes' in the Oc or Occitan--Southern France,
> > northern Spain, Western Italy, etc.--and in the Middle Ages the Oc
> > people did have close ties to the English and even intermarried, but
> > people today I've talked to argue for a different evolution of o.k.
>
>There are many bogus theories, but the only one with actual documentary
>evidence is that "O.K." first appeared in Boston in 1839 as a newspaper
>abbreviation of "oll korrect", a misspelling of "all correct" fashionable
>at the time.  It came to national prominence due to its association with
>the initials of "Old Kinderhook", a nickname for American presidential
>candidate Martin van Buren, whose partisans used "O.K.!" as a rallying
>cry.  The OED's 1839 quotation:
>
>	C. G. GREENE in Boston Morning Post 23 Mar. 2/2 He...would
>	have the 'contribution box', et ceteras, o.k. -- all correct --
>	and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
>
>The Occitan theory is particularly impossible, because "o" in Occitan is
>not pronounced /O/ but /u/; it is final -a in Occitan that is pronounced
>/O/, as in _luna_ [lynO] 'moon'.  I believe the word _oc_ itself is
>simply /u/.
>
>
I'm not sure of the vowel in oc but it's not u it might be sort of U;
the hard c is pronounced!

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com

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Received on Saturday, 17 March 2007 20:31:25 UTC