Eh (W3)
(E?)(L?) http://www.billcasselman.com/casselmania/mania_eh.htm
The True Story of a Canadian Interjection
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"Eh" comes in two basic flavours, two broad categories of usage: final interrogative "eh"? with a rising intonation, and narrative "eh" with a sustained or flat intonation and found in the midst of spoken Canadian English sentences. Pop culture icons like Bob and Doug Mackenzie, those two hosers on SCTV played in the 1970s to the 1980s by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, popularized and used "eh?" repeatedly as a marker of Canadian speech. The two actors were simply reproducing what they heard in everyday Canadian life. But the popularity of SCTV in the United States also helped some Americans and more Canadians become aware that "eh" was a characteristic of Canuck talk. Long before the hosers, of course, academics were writing their eh-says too.
What is Eh?
In the magisterial words of the Oxford English Dictionary, "eh" is “an exclamation of instinctive origin. . .an interjectional interrogative particle often inviting assent to the sentiment expressed.” Wordy, eh? An "interjection" is a marginal lexical item like "oops", "ouch", "wow", "tut-tut", "tsk-tsk", "ugh", and "yuck". It is a part of speech thrown into a sentence for emotive effect. Compare its origin in the Latin word "interiectio" ‘something thrown in between’ from "inter" Latin "between" + "iectio", "iectonis" Latin "a throwing".
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But we cannot go too far and claim "eh" is exclusively Canadian. Chaucer used it, eh? That’s Geoffrey Chaucer, poet, author of The Canterbury Tales, written between A.D. 1387 and 1400. Chaucer used the Middle English form "ey?" and variants in some of the same ways Canadians still do. The interjection is well over six hundred years old.
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"Eh" has many functions in everyday Canadian talk.
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Canadians use it very frequently as a spoken question mark, inviting the agreement of the person they are speaking to. ... It is a question tag much like the French terminal "n’est-ce pas?" or the German "nicht wahr?" Of course, "eh?" along with "eh bien" and "hein?" has been an interrogative tag in Parisian and Québécois French for centuries.
In English, subtle shades of expressive connotation occur in the manifold uses of eh. Avis distinguishes eight main categories of usage. Here are three examples chosen by Professor Avis from the short stories in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House (1970):
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Other Canadian & Foreign Uses of Eh?
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ExtraCanadian Usage of the Interjection
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"Eh" may be obsolescent, even dying out utterly as a distinctive marker of Canadian speech. The latest linguistic usage surveys show that fewer and fewer Canadians under the age of 30 are employing "eh". Like the rest of Stephen Harper’s twilit Canada, it too may soon be out of work.
Erstellt: 2014-12