How do you say and spell ........ ?

I just tried to say 'uh oh' and 'oy vey' simultaneously......

it came out "om"......

Joe( wise ass)Nation

Joe, I gotta tell ya, this is really driving me crazy.

I've tried all different ways to get any sort of a "t" sound while saying uh oh, and I just can't even begin to manage it.

Tell me the truth, is this some sort of a joke thread, and I'm the only one not in on it?

Can you post something off of youtube or somewhere, where the person is making a T sound while saying uh oh?

I mean besides Buckwheat?

Sometimes I use the "t" sound in there, but not always. It's prob just a midwest thing...but I'm not really from the "midwest"....I was born and live right on the line that splits the midwest from the south.

My speech is somewhat similar to Buckwheats though, or would probably sound that way to most city folk....in my own home, my speech is totally different than when I venture out into the world, because if I don't switch it, nobody outside my county will understand half of what I say....unless I'm in West Memphis.

Some of the white people here speak with a true midwestern accent, heavily influenced by the German-midwestern that is spoken 20 miles north of me....and then there are those that sound like they just crawled out of the hills. Ever watch Squidbillies?...I know many people that sound exactly like the characters on that show.

Many of our black folks, migrated here from Mississippi and Ark, and have a deep south accent. My wife, who is from the German area, can not understand many of the black folks here, or even many of the whites either....some of us speak with a mix of these accents, and it can get very blurry.

I have an uncle that sounds like he lived in New Oreleans his entire life....but he just hung around and grew up with some of those deep south black families....he also picked cotton side by side with them. We also have quite a few black families that speak like Charlie Pride....very white southern.

This "word" pretty much sums up what I mean by the black-white-southern mix.

Bofadem = Both of them. They often replace the "th" with an "f", the "a" is not really anthing either, just a noise in the middle...more like "uh"....and then generally shave off anything that is not needed, such as "them" turning to "em". My own version of that "word" is close to that, but different...and I have no idea how to spell it.

I say "Oh ut" but that is neither here nor there.

You're right. It's really kind of nowhere.

Anyone who's ever seen a Disney wildlife film from the 1950s knows it's "uh-oh".

Hey, here's the thing, Chao, you probably don't spend as much time alone as I do. Sometimes there's days that go by without me actually speaking with someone. (That isn't as bad as it sounds) My point is, when I sometimes talk out loud to myself I find myself really listening to how I say words. The sounds.... and I find myself wondering about the smallest things.

I am fascinated by languages and how human beings figured out to communicate with each other in so many myriad ways. Right now I am exploring the history and origins of English. It's so interesting to me, at least, that English speakers took all the endings necessary to German, Frisian and Norse and let them evaporate into thin air. Need to know whether to use a feminine or male ending as in French??? Nope. We speakers of English dropped all that. I'd really like to know why the earlier languages were MORE complicated than the language created out of them. That's next.

Thanks for asking.

Joe(silly, amn't I?)Nation

Not that they were more complicated as I find nothing complicated with feminine or masculine endings.

It's only that they allowed a larger scope of expressing feeling and nuances..

Fascinating stuff, 2Packs.

Francis, no one who speaks a language with F/M endings thinks that they complicate communication, especially if they learned it as a first language, but when speakers of English find out they need to remember whether the word for 'plate' needs a different ending than 'fork', they roll their eyes ask "Why"?

Right after that we let them know that the sex of a person will change the way a verb relating to them is spoken.
I went down the road, the men went down the road, the girl went down the road.
In French, German, Polish, Russian and several others languages, there would be three different "went"s in that sentence. Right? That's not a criticism (how can anybody criticize the grammar of another's language?), it just shows why English speakers see other languages are overly embroidered with trims and unneeded buttons.

I'd be very interesting in knowing more about how the use of masculine/feminine allows a speaker to have greater nuance and feeling. It might give me some insight into why the older languages had so many endings and voices.

Joe(I'm a sponge for information)Nation

I relate to all that. The time alone and the thinking/exploration that happens. I like this thread..

I love the way English accretes, but there is plenty of weirdness as a result of and independent of its ongoing incorporation of just about any word of any value in any language it rubs shoulders with to "make down" (if you will) for its lack of gender confusion.

No, that is not right, at least not for French. He has: il a, she has: elle a. The gender modification is used for words which modify the subject or the object. He gave it to the handsome boy: Il l'a donné au beau garçon. But, he gave it to the pretty girl: Il l a donné à la belle fille. Belle is the feminine equivalent of beau; to further confuse the issue, if the word modifies a masculine noun which begins with a vowel, and the ordinary placement were before the noun (actually uncommon in French), the beau becomes bel, as in bel ami. If the it he were giving were feminine, then donné becomes donnée. If it were feminine and plural, it becomes données. This is no longer that useful, but at one time it was critical, as a word might have a different meaning when the gender changes. The word for book is livre, which is masculine. The word for pound, as in a measure of weight or a unit of currency is livre, which is feminine. Alas, the French are changing many things--but i doubt if gender identification for words will change any time soon. It is, by the way, a feminist ranting misconception that languages with gender identification are sexist. The word for mustache is a feminine noun--the word for breast is a masculine noun.

Thank you, Setanta, helpful as always. I really like the explanation that "If the it he were giving were feminine, then donné becomes donnée. If it were feminine and plural, it becomes données." Very nice and to the English speaker (me) it seems highly complex. It's not, I know, but compared to English which is nearly naked of such sexing of words and grammar, 'tis. ***

Most of the ones we do have we stole from the French. (masseur,masseuse; actor, actress; comedian, comedienne [actually, I haven't seen comedienne in print for about fifteen years, have you?]) Then there are the ones which only seem sexed: Seamstress, and er, seamster? no...tailor. Except when The Birds sang "My mother was a tailor, she sewed those old blue jeans...."

But it's the grammar that is interesting to me. Don't you find it fascinating that we went from "The woman she comes herself now the house inside." which we were using in Old English to "The woman came inside the house." ?? What a road we've traveled.
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I'm particularly interested in how English, written English, is changing due to the Internet and boards like this one. Setanta says "Alas" regarding the French making changes, but there has never been a language which didn't change. Despite all the efforts of the Correct English Brigades, the language continues to reshape itself with the elasticity of Silly Putty, including its ability to pick up words from other (comics) pages.
There are some battles going on now, I'm sure, over whether it is proper to use IMO or RU in an office memo. Ten years from now, no one will notice as long as the meaning is clear.
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And will there still be a lag between how we speak and how we write? We always clean up the little shortcuts we use in common speech when we put what we want to say on paper (or the screen.), which is why, although thousands of people speak 'Na'Orlins' putting that grammar on the page would be a wholenuther thing.

Joe(Viewpoint and Standpoint were once considered improper words.)Nation

*** Grammar Police Alert: They would have this as ""If the it he WAS giving were feminine, then donné becomes donnée. If it WAS feminine and plural, it becomes données." They also don't like "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner".

You are all stark raving mad...adopt something sensible like...
Bugger !
Stone the bloody crows !
Wouldnt it !

ASL is a relatively new language that is continuing to change and become standardized -- nearly all of the changes are towards simplification. For example, an old sign for "dog" was to slap one's thigh and then do a snapping motion. That has changed to just the snapping motion.

I think that's just about efficiency, being able to communicate as simply and clearly as possible. Languages kind of expand and contract I think, with simplicity and efficiency contracting things, and nuance and novelty expanding things.

soz(youngsters always want to be able to linguistically mystify their elders)obe

It makes sense to me that languages would become simpler, what I'm looking at now was why they were so complicated in the first place.

Think about this: You're a nice bunch of humans about 10,000 years ago. Where are you? I dunno know, somewhere near where Iraq is now. What's your conversation sound like? One would think it would be pretty simple -Hollywood always portrays language that way - but linguists, the folks who figure out these things, say "No, Proto-Indo-European, the language which is the root of most Western languages except Basque (where the hell did they come from?)(and what's with the Finns and the Hungarians??) was already chock full of endings signifying case(eight of them) and tenses - past, present and future and more.

Not just, "You go. Get firewood." but, depending upon who was speaking to whom (leader/follower;mother/child; one herder to another) many ways, each with their own endings to express "I'm the boss of you" or "This is she-am-who-am speaking" to"Hey, be a pal and .... ." Somehow the firewood got gotten. This is 10,000 years ago.

How come? You're trying to create a little civilization so you don't have to keep packing up every six to eight weeks and moving to the next green place. A couple of guys are working on making those wild sheep hang around the campsite by feeding them (It's working with wolf-dogs and you've got some cats keeping the rats out of the packs of grain you try to drag along with you.) A bunch of the women have learned the shape and size of every plant, root or leaf and whether or not each needs to beaten before eating. (You've got no pots yet to cook in.) The latest thing you've come up with is using a bunch of sheephides sewn together to keep off the rain and keep out the dust. Wouldn't you Keep IT SIMPLE, Sha'ilahbulah? Nope. You've got the future imperative case and the Royal We. Huh. How about that?

So, from about 20,000 years ago when we left Africa to about 10,000, humans created a fairly complex method of communicating and then, over the next 9000 years it got really complicated with sentences just dripping with significant add-ons, endings and markers.

I've got a lot of reading to do.

Joe(first, I have to go get firewood)Nation

Oh my bloody God.

Iraq is the cradle of all civilisation, including your little fledgling one.

um.
True.
But mebbe not most Asians, they probably went the "beachcomber route" across the Southern End of the Red Sea, skipping the Fertile Crescent entirely, but pretty much all the rest of us blokes got our start just outside of present Babylon.

Joe(no wonder I like lamb stew)Nation

Bullshit. Ever heard of China? Ever heard of the Indus River valley? Ever heard of the Toltecs? Ever heard of the Incas? Spare us the melodramatics, please.

By the way, our "fledgling civilization" was fledged from your own shop worn civilization. Any complaints should be addressed to your fellow countrymen.