I think constructions like “Are we there yet?” are mistakenly derived from constructions like “Aren’t we there yet?”, which means “Are we still not there?” to express impatience. I think (?) I remember not hearing “Are we there yet?” until more recent decades.
Why do you say it’s a mistake? Seems a normal construction to me.
It’s a mistake because people say “Are we there yet?” when we are on the way there, and arriving is in the future, but literally it asks if we continue to be there, as if arriving was in the past. They are trying to say “Are we still not there?” as if it’s taking surprisingly long to get there, but they are actually saying “We have been there but I’m asking if we continue to be there now”.
I’m not sure I understand the objection. I typically use it to mean something more along the lines of “now,” with a degree of anticipation. The very first definition on dictionary.com is:
yet
adverb
1, at the present time; now:
Don’t go yet. Are they here yet?
I’m not sure why you’re saying it’s a mistake.
I’m surprised they haven’t reviewed this with him and modified his way of talking. Maybe they’ve decided that, if it gets people talking about him and his station, it’s best to just leave it as is.
Now that you mention it, it seems to me he is using ‘yet’ to indicate ‘now’. As in 'Traffic is slow getting into Seattle now due to wet roads,’ and ‘There’s a collision, so your trip to Seattle is still going to take about 45 minutes now .’
Interestingly, my Aunt (Dad’s sister) worked in an elderly care home for a time after she got her nursing degree. Many of the residents were Jewish. She had absolutely no problem conversing with them, as the Swiss-German dialect she learned as a child was very similar to Yiddish.
I’m finding definitions more like this:
adverb
adverb: yet
- up until the present
- still
So, saying “are we there yet?”, suggesting we have been there up until the present, when arrival is still in the future, is wrong. “Are we there still?” is wrong the same way, but more obviously so to people more clear about the meaning of “still”.
That’s fairly limited, here is a respectable source:
That is a more comprehensive definition that encompasses how the word is used in English.
Specifically this definition seems to apply:
(2) : at this or that time : so soon as now
Margaret DuMont: I’ve never been so insulted in my entire life!
Groucho: We’ll, it’s early yet.
Are we having FUN yet? – Zippy
‘Hurricanes, yet!’ - Key Largo
I’m hanging out with my aforementioned Wisconsinite mother-in-law and this “yet” construction is constantly showing up. Today she asked me “are those onions good yet?” not to mean “have they matured and are now good to eat?” which is how I would normally use “yet,” but rather to mean if they were still good. “Yet” for “still” is usual in her dialect.
A sighting in the wild!
And I just spotted another usage in another thread from a post yesterday (Dec. 26):
(Bold added.) Here, “yet” means “nevertheless” or “but”.
That’s a completely normal usage, as far as I can tell, not something dialectal like some of the other ones in this thread.
I wonder if there is any correlation between positive “yet” and positive “anymore”.
That sounds okay to my ear.
I have heard this construction amongst the Mennonite community in Ohio. It’s very odd to my non-Mennonite Ohio ears. I suspect it might be a German or Pennsylvania Dutch related usage.
It seems that linguists use the terms “polarity sensitive items”, “positive polarity item” (PPI) and “negative polarity item” (NPI). One paper I found online includes:
- any
- yet
- either
- can help
- ever
- lift a finger
as examples of negative polarity items.
I also learn that negative polarity items don’t require an explicitly negative sentence - they can be “licensed” by a negative environment or context, including use of “rarely”, “too”, “few”, “barely”, “refuse”. E.g. “I don’t like rain. Few of my friends like it either.” “I rarely see any woodpeckers in this area.” “I am too old to go hill-running anymore”.
It’s clear from this thread that for some posters (e.g. Napier) the positive use of “yet” (with the meaning of “still”) is completely acceptable, whereas for others “yet” is more strongly constrained to negative polarity and so the positive use sounds wrong.
I am reminded of a discussion of the opening lines of The Road:
“The snow fell, nor did it cease to fall”
where this use of “nor” was acceptable to some posters and not to others.