I've grown up from the Northern central US to Southern US. Have a weird accent, sounds like great lakes sort of and stranger sentence structure, what?
2007-03-02 01:24:23 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
"What" as a sentence particle has a long history in English. The first word of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is "Hwæt". It is not part of the sentence that follows, it is just a exclamatory particle. "What" at the end of the sentence is the same thing--a particle that elicits attention on the part of the listener. Different dialects of English have moved the "What" from the front end of the sentence (as it was in Old English times) to the end.
2007-03-02 04:59:38 · answer #1 · answered by Taivo 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
In the play and film "The Madness of King George", George III is portrayed as punctuating his dialogue with little verbal tics like "What-what!" and "Yesyes!" Could this be anything to do with his German origins? Germans like to stick word like "wohl" and "gel" at the end of sentences, what?
2007-03-02 01:41:09 · answer #2 · answered by Doethineb 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I'm sorry, but I don't think there will be an etymological explanation
for a "dialectal stopgap" like your "what". You just say it.
Like many people often end their sentences with "you know".
2007-03-02 02:10:48 · answer #3 · answered by Corneille 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋