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Path: utzoo!lsuc!msb
From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.nlang.africa
Subject: Re: Derivation of O.K.
Message-ID: <678@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Jun-85 23:11:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: lsuc.678
Posted: Fri Jun 28 23:11:23 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 00:20:01 EDT
References: <7329@watdaisy.UUCP>
Reply-To: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 48
Summary: Could that African theory be backwards?

Let me see how much I can chop down the background... about 30 lines of
included text follow.  The "|" at left is so that those with rn 4.3 can skip
all the included matter including my interpolated remarks (those with "|" only).

| Debra Ansen (mhuxj!daa) started this:
| 
| > I just read that the word "Okay" stems from the Wolof word "wawkay"...
| > ... brought into American English by slaves brought over from West Africa.
| 
| Mike Thornburg (dmt@Glacier.ARPA) quoted Robert Claiborne's book "Our
| Marvelous Native Tongue" (Times Books, NY, 1983):
| 
| > Easily the prize Africanism in American English, WHENCE IT HAS PASSED
| > INTO A DOZEN TONGUES AROUND THE WORLD, is our omnipresent "O.K."
| (emphasis mine - msb)
| 
| But Gregory Rawlins (watdaisy!gjerawlins) quoted a review from the language
| quarterly Verbatim (winter 1985), which, while favorable to the book, noted
| that Claiborne "... is a journalist, not an academic ..." and and also said:
| 
| > ... I can see that it is more romantic to suppose that it is a word from
| > the West African language, Wolof, ...  But to state [this] unequivocally
| > ... is to go too far.  The serious historian and scholar of language should
| > indicate that there is no form of acceptable documentation to support the
| > wild conjecture.
| 
| Gregory then commented:
| 
| > ... (the resemblance between 'o-ke' and 'O.K.'seems rather strong and the
| > derivation is certainly plausible) and so I submit that even if no
| > "acceptable documentation" (whatever that is) can be found to support this
| > "wild conjecture" that it be accepted as yet another _possible_ derivation
| > of O.K.

Right, my turn (Mark Brader - lsuc!msb):

The resemblance certainly is strong, but if the magazine reviewer (who is
presumably more competent at all this than any of us) says there is a total
lack of documentation, that likely means that Wolof is not a language in which
there is a lot of ancient writing available.  And that means there's nothing
to show that Wolof didn't get the word FROM English.

Considering the extent to which English words -- including "O.K.", as noted
in the emphasis above -- have been exported across the world generally, it
seems much more plausible to me that "O.K." originated in English and traveled
TO Africa with the slavers.  (I kind of like the "Oll Korrect" theory, myself.)

Mark Brader