I’m going to go against the grain here and suggest that maybe there is something about the semantics of the word itself.
The funny thing about OK is that it implies virtually nothing. It’s a way of saying “fine” or “affirmative” but it doesn’t imply that something is good or bad or what my feeling is about it.
Perhaps the word filled a need in more than just English? My IANA-linguist, super WAG, is that languages tend to put words to passionate / interested sentiments first, and tend to lack neutral words.
Are there many uses of “okay” which “all right” cannot serve for as well? (I’m not trying to argue against “okay” or any such silly thing; I’m just trying to see where the idea that “okay” fills a gap which would otherwise be unaddressed comes from and how accurate it is)
That’s a really astute observation (though I’m not sure about languages generally lacking neutral words). The semantics (in English) of OK do imply a minimum of commitment in most contexts today, and from what I’ve heard in other countries, it’s pretty similar there, too. Other languages, though–as far as I know–don’t employ it as a discourse marker as English does, for which the “neutral” quality serves well.
Not many–and I think there was a previous thread about okay in which this exact question was addressed. But, for this reason, I believe the phonology of okay has contributed to its spread into other languages, as opposed to all right.
There is a difference between chao and ciao, though, or between the usage in Italian and in Spanish: in Spanish we use it only to mean “goodbye”, in Italian it means both. It takes a while to being used to getting greeted with “ciao”, if you’re a Hispanic in Italy - at first, your reaction to it is “why is this person telling me ‘goodbye’? We’re just getting to meet each other now!”
In one of the reviews of Metcalf’s book, the reviewer mentioned the invention of the telegraph in spreading the use of OK. I know it was used in the US and Britain that way since the mid-1800s. Was it also used by other countries in telegraphy?
I would expect it to be split along language lines at the very least. In most languages, the letter group “OK” would not be spelled in a way which sounds like “okay”.
Uh, in the languages I’m familiar with, what we do is say okay (well, if I was to spell it using Spanish phonics, okéi). I’ve heard people say o-ka, with a short stop between both letters to make it clear they were spelling and not saying oca (which means goose), but it was as a joke.
We got it from Italian, but Italian got it from a different language: Venetian. From the Venetian phrase sciào vostro, ‘(I am) your slave’, which was a conventional polite expression centuries ago that you would say to be polite to anyone. Kind of like 18th-century letter writing in English, where it was conventional to sign off with expressions like “(I am) your obedient servant.” The nearest analogy in contemporary English is “If there is anything I can do for you…” uttered as a conventional courtesy without much expectation of the offer actually being taken up.
The original Venetian pronunciation of the word for slave was /stʃao/, but Italian doesn’t allow that initial consonant cluster, so it got simplified.
Chāy is the Persian word for tea, which became a loanword throughout the entire western half of Asia: Arabic, Hindi, Kazakh, Russian, Turkish, etc., wherever Persian cultural influence extended. It derives from cha, the Mandarin pronunciation of 茶. Characteristic of Persian is to add a -y offglide to monosyllabic words ending in a long vowel. The Hokkien pronunciation of 茶 is te, which became *teh *in Malay (because the Malay-speaking region got most of its Chinese contacts from Fujian a.k.a. Hokkien), and Dutch traders brought the Malay form of the word to western Europe.
No thanks. I’m going to assume it’s true and let the discussion go in the interesting directions it’s gone. You’re free to disagree and find other threads that interest you.
“OK” is used in the German made film “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” (1933). So I suspect WW I took it across the Big Pond pretty well, and maybe WW II spread it everywhere else. I’ve heard it used in Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and who knows what all else that I’m not recalling now.