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So eh? is Canadian, eh?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Walter S. Avis
Walter S. Avis*
Affiliation:
The Royal Military College of Canada
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Extract

In a somewhat condescending review of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles some years ago, Mavor Moore complained about “a slighting of spoken practice and of distinctive Canadian syntax,” among his objections being the absence of an entry for eh?, for “both the English and the Americans can spot a Canadian from his ‘eh?’ at the end of a sentence: ‘It’s hot, eh?’” Admittedly, the interjection is not in the DC; moreover, there are no slips for eh? in the citation files of the Lexicographical Centre for Canadian English. This situation certainly indicates that the readers for the DC did not consider it a Canadianism: either that or they were unaware that eh? might be relevant to the collection.

The second of these possibilities may be set aside, for eh? is, in fact, entered in the Intermediate Dictionary and the Senior Dictionary, general dictionaries of English published in Canada for Canadians as part of the Dictionary of Canadian English series, to which the DC belongs. It should be added that eh? is also entered in every general dictionary of English, both British and American, on my shelves—a very considerable collection indeed, and one which includes the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary (Third Edition).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 17 , Issue 2-3 , 1972 , pp. 89 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1972

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References

1 Walter S. Avis, Editor-in-Chief (Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1967).

2 “How We Talk Canadian,” Saturday Night, November, 1967, pp. 54-55. Two other objections might be included here: “Most often … where an Englishman says ‘Have you a match?’ and an American, ‘Do you have a match?,’ a Canadian will say ‘Have you got a match?’” and “… when are we going to find a Canadian dictionary which tells us that aunt is pronounced ahnt in the Maritimes, ant in the West and ayunt (sometimes) in Ontario—all by literate people and thus all acceptably?”

3 Toronto: W. J. Gage: Beginning, 1962; Intermediate, 1963; Senior, 1967.

4 January 4, 1971, p. 11.

5 Toronto: General Publishing, 1970, pp. 77-78.

6 “Canadian-American Speech Differences Along the Middle Border,” JCLA 5 (1959), 20. Orkin’s statement is embedded in his discussion of Allen’s findings, the last sentence of the above quotation being offered as a direct quotation (Orkin, p. 78).

7 Ibid., fn. 4.

8 Among the several Americans who called this feature to my attention was Professor Charles C. Fries, one of my professors at the University of Michigan, who had noted it in my speech (1951-52).

9 Avis, Walter S., “Canadian English Merits a Dictionary,” Culture XVIII (1957), 245–56.Google Scholar

10 Indeed, the whole field of “interjections,” this and others like it, has been little explored, with the result that their history and regional distribution is remarkably obscure, although many of them—including eh—have been in use for centuries. If I had the privilege of suggesting thesis topics for graduate students in English-language studies, I would urge one of them to tackle this complex and fascinating problem.

11 Although the OED cites the form eh (no interrogative) as early as 1567, this spelling appears not to have become established for another century, probably as a result of French influence during the Restoration era, when it took on certain interrogative functions represented by eh? Middle English antecedents appear to include such forms as ey?, ei?, eigh?, I?; Early Modern variants include such forms as ay?, hay?, hey?, heh?, he?, which appear in the seventeenth century, some of them being occasionally encountered still. The influence of the Great Vowel Shift, dialectal mixture, and orthographic tradition complicate the problem of interpreting the phonological development of these and similar interjections and I am not prepared to attempt a solution here. See fn. 16.

12 In addition, the OED has citations for eh? covering the following dates: 1773, 1816, 1837, a1845, 1859, 1867, 1869, 1870, 1903, 1905. The spotty treatment of eh? in the OED no doubt reflects a small file of citations, readers being prone to disregard such trivia. Scholars, too, seem to have had little time for interjections, for the etymological dictionaries offer little help. As C. T. Onions says at eh in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966): “The origin and history of these uses are not clear….”

13 In my limited reading of American newspapers, I have recently encountered a few instances of eh?, for example, in a column by Hal Boyle, of the Associated Press (New York), and in a letter to the editor of Time originating in the U.S. I have also heard it occasionally on TV and in late-show movies. Last month I heard a twelve-year-old on WSYR-TV, Syracuse say “Look at the shape of them, eh?” I suspect that I am so accustomed to hearing eh? (and using it) that more instances pass me by than catch my attention.

14 I have many citations of eh? from Canadian newspapers and magazines, including the Kingston Whig-Standard, Globe and Mail (Toronto), Telegram (Toronto), Toronto Star, Gazette (Montreal), Globe Magazine (Toronto), Canadian Magazine (Toronto), Weekend Magazine (Montreal), Hockey News (Montreal), The Legion (Toronto), Maclean’s (Toronto), Saturday Night (Toronto), and Time (Canada Edition). These citations were found in editorials, news stories, articles, political writings, and, most often, on the sports pages; some, indeed, were found in headlines, advertisements, picture captions, cartoons, crossword puzzles, and other features. Among the widely known Canadian newspaper-writers represented are Kenneth Bagnell, George Bain, Dick Beddoes, Jim Coleman, R. J. Needham, Elizabeth Thompson, and Scott Young.

15 It may be significant that eh? appears rarely or never in writings by some authors of the U.S. South: Caldwell, Capote, Faulkner, Welty, Williams, for example—at least in what I have sampled.

16 As is the case with most interjections, early evidence for ha? (and variants a? and ah?) is ambiguous because of imprecise punctuation in the manuscripts and later editorial interpretations; that is, ha! (and so on) occurs in contexts which are probably interrogative and where in times of more settled tradition ha? would appear. My latest citation for ha? is from George Colman, The Jealous Wife, I, i. John Gower uses ha? exclusively in Confessio Amantis (a1398), whereas his contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer uses ey? (or some variant). The spelling variant hah appears early in the seventeenth century (as hah! in Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Pt. 1, IV, i); hah? appears later in the century and, like ah? is still met with on occasion in English writings. Other probable variants of huh? can be cited, including uh?, unhh?, umh?, and um?. See fn. 11.

17 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, 1969) does not even include an interrogative sense for huh?. I might add that John S. Kenyon, author of American Pronunciation, includes the following exercise for students: “Represent in symbols the sounds you think are meant by the spelling “Humph,” “Eh?” … (9th ed.; Ann Arbor, 1946, p. 48, and in the 10th ed., 1958, p. 43).

18 I have recent citations in which eh? is attributed to Governor General Michener; Prime Minister Trudeau; Secretary of State Pelletier; Sylvanus Apps, MPP; George Benn, MPP; Mayor Dennison of Toronto; a couple of magistrates, and a host of hockey players. In the Globe and Mail (22 Apr., 1972, p. 47), Dick Beddoes quotes boxer Clyde Gray thus: “What he said was reverent, appreciative, Canadian. ‘A hell of a day, eh?’”

19 In the usage-scales established by Joos, Martin in The Five Clocks (New York, 1961)Google Scholar, eh? would be basically “casual style,” but frequently “consultative,” especially when used to invite the listener or reader to participate in the relationship as an insider.

20 In British usage, this eh? is often reinforced by what? or what’s that?, usages at least as old as Chaucer (1385)—”For love of God, make of this thing an ende,/Or slee us both at ones er that ye wende.”—“I, what?” quod she. “By God and by my trouthe,/I noot not what ye wilne that I saye.” (an exchange between Pandarus and Criseide in Troilus and Criseide, Book III); see also James Hilton, Good-bye Mr. Chips, Ch. 8 (1934): “Eh? What’s that, Oh, yes, yes. …” Classed as “colloq. or vulgar” by the OED and as “brusque or rude” by C. T. Onions, op. cit., these usages are widespread throughout the English-speaking world, although, judging by my files, relatively rare nowadays in print. My father, an Englishman, abhorred eh? = What’s that?, instructing his children to say “I beg your pardon”— with indifferent success.

21 This category is far and away the most common use of eh? wherever English is spoken; it is also the most complex, especially with regard to the variety of elliptical usages. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these usages were a function of ha?, which was apparently displaced in the literature by he?, hey?, heh? in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth; eh? became established in the eighteenth century, becoming the usual form in the nineteenth—as it still is.

22 I guess, a North Americanism, is not in evidence elsewhere in such contexts. The following tautology is interesting—and not unusual in Canada: “Well,” he said, scratching his head. “Well, I guess that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, eh?”–1970, Weekend Magazine (Montreal), 20 June, p. 11.

23 Most of my few citations for this usage are Canadian; none are American. My single British citation is the following: “Make us a cuppa char, eh, mate?”–1969, Larry Forrester, Battle of the April Storm—which belongs in Category 7 below.

24 The OED gives the same citation as “Wasn’t it lucky, eh?” The difference suggests editorial interpretation of what the punctuation should be, the OED version doubtless giving the right signal. Current editorial practice seems to prefer the eh? to be set off by internal punctuation.

25 This arrangement, very common in all sources, might well have been listed as a subclass of almost any of the aforementioned categories, as revealed by the samples.

26 Here, too, it is often a moot point whether the punctuation reflects intended intonation differences, or whether it reflects only editorial decision. In older sources, interrogative interjections often came first in the sentence—another editorial convention perhaps. In any event, such word order is relatively uncommon nowadays, in print at least.

27 While the narrative eh? is probably not a recent innovation, it has certainly increased in intensity in the last decade. In many situations, its occurrence parallels that of see? and you know?, both of which intrude habitually in the narrative style of some speakers, especially the little educated. Just last month I heard a TV interview with a Canadian hockey player who used you know? forty-five times during three minutes of speaking; he used eh? once. That same week I had a conversation with another Canadian, also a hockey player, who used eh? no less often, seemingly at the end of every breath group.

28 The absence of interrogation marks in several of the above examples (and some of those that follow) probably represents the intonation rightly.

29 The last two citations come from a two-page “Transcript in part of tape recordings of telephone calls tapped by [Toronto] police at the home of Vincent Alexander over more than a month this Spring [March-April, 1968].” In this fascinating, informal corpus—which is very badly punctuated and is transcribed, apparently, by several persons—eh? (twice spelled ay?) occurs 20 times and is used by 6 different speakers in 9 of 14 conversations. All but one of the above-listed categories are represented: Category 1, 1 instance; C. 2, 9 instances; C. 3, 2 instances; C. 4, 0 instances; C. 5, 1 instance; C. 6, 3 instances; C. 7, 1 instance; C. 8, 3 instances.

30 Eh? is a common contour-carrier among French Canadians (along with eh bien and hein?), as it has been in the French language for centuries. This circumstance may have contributed to the high popularity of the interjection in Canada generally.

31 This sample is from a thirty-minute talk about the Amchitka explosion by a Professor of Physics, internationally recognized as a conservationist. The interjections were many, short, and often without rising intonation.

32 The first eh had falling, the second rising intonation.

33 It must be added that exactly the same “slogan” was used by the same company in the same newspaper at about the same time in December 1971, a year later; the advertiser would seem to think that it was eye-catching and effective in getting Torontonians who had ignored their Christmas shopping overlong to get on with it—at the store offering the advertised bargains.

34 The following comment from a newly arrived immigrant (September 1971) from Belfast reflects the widely held misconception discussed in this paper: “I now use the distinctively Canadian ‘eh?’ at the end of statements. People may not understand my words, but at the sound of ‘eh’ they at least know I’m through talking.” Toronto Star, May 13, 1972, p. 18.