Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate, sÄŤc. That shows that the i is long, so itâs pronounced like âseekâ and not like âsick.â
You might recognize this word from Latin sayings like âsic semper tyrannisâ or âsic transit gloria mundi.â You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someoneâs mistakes when youâre quoting them: âThen he texted me, âI want to touch youâre (sic) butt.ââ
It means, âthus,â which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning âin this way,â or âjust like that.â As in, âjust like that, to all tyrants, forever,â an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg. âEveryone should do it this way.â
Anyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes.
Ego: Num edisti totam pitam?
Me: Did you eat all the pizza?
You, shameful: Thatâs the way it is./Yes.
This was pretty well established by the time Latin evolved into its various bastard children, the Romance languages, and you can see this by the words for yes in these languages.
In Spanish, Italian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Galician, Friulian, and others, you say si for yes. In Portugese, you say sim. In French, you say si to mean yes when youâre contradicting a negative assertion (âYou donât like donkey sausage like all of us, the inhabitants of France, eat all the time?â âYes, I do!â). In Romanian, you say da, but thatâs because theyâre on some Slavic shit. P.S. there are possibly more Romance languages than youâre aware of.
There was still influence in some areas by the conquered Gaulish tribes on the language of their conquerors. We donât really have anything of Gaulish language left, but we can reverse engineer some things from their descendants. You see, the Celts that we think of now as the people of the British Isles were Gaulish, originally (in the sense that anyoneâs originally from anywhere, I guess) from central and western Europe. So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tĂł to mean yes, or Welsh, where they say do to mean yes or indeed, and we can see that they derive from the Proto-Indo-European (the big mother language at whose teat very many languages both modern and ancient did suckle) word *tod, meaning âthisâ or âthat.â (The asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word and we donât know exactly what it would have been but we have a pretty damn good idea.)
So if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like, âYo, did you eat all the pizza?â you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say, âThis.â Then you would have him surrounded and killed.
Apparently Latin(ish) speakers in the area thought this was a very dope way of expressing themselves. âWhy should I say âin that wayâ like those idiots in Italy and Spain when I could say âthisâ like all these cool mustache boys in Gaul?â So they started copying the expression, but in their own language. (Thatâs called a calque, by the way. When you borrow an expression from another language but translate it into your own. If you care about that kind of shit.)
The Latin word for âthisâ is âhoc,â so a bunch of people started saying âhocâ to mean yes. In the southern parts of what was once Gaul, âhocâ makes the relatively minor adjustment to òc, while in the more northerly areas they think, âHmm, just saying âthisâ isnât cool enough. What if we said âthis thatâ to mean âyes.ââ (This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already.)
So they combined hoc with ille, which means âthatâ (but also comes to just mean âheâ: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on) to make o-il, which becomes oĂŻl. This difference between the north and south (i.e. saying oc or oil) comes to be so emblematic of the differences between the two languages/dialects that the languages from the north are called langues dâoil and the ones from the south are called langues dâoc. In fact, the latter language is now officially called âOccitan,â which is a made-up word (to a slightly greater degree than that to which all words are made-up words) that basically means âOc-ish.â They speak Occitan in southern France and Catalonia and Monaco and some other places.
The oil languages include a pretty beefy number of languages and dialects with some pretty amazing names like Walloon, and also one with a much more basic name: French. Perhaps youâve heard of it, n'est-ce pas?
Yeah, eventually Francophones drop the -l from oil and start saying it as oui. If youâve ever wondered why French yes is different from other Romance yeses, well, now you know.
I guess what Iâm getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with âthis,â or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying âYeah, thatâ: youâre not new
