ooh aaaaaah

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Captain Kremmen, Jun 26, 2007.

  1. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Ooh aaaaaah. In the Black Country of the West Midlands, not far away from where I live, this sound means something. It means "Yes I hear what you are saying. That's something which I hadn't thought of and I realise now that you are completely correct and I was wrong". I wonder whether this is a word, and so would need to be translated into other languages, or whether it is a sound that other peoples would understand without translation. The sound of the word, if you are not familiar with it, rises in pitch to the letter h, then falls in pitch on the aaaaaaah which is longer than the ooh. The ooh is about one second long and the aaaaaah is about two seconds long. At three second in length it is clearly something which is meant to have importance. (It is nothing like the Cornish yokel's ooharrrgh. (I don't know whether they actually say that or whether it's just a joke. Different Question, but answer it if you like.)
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It's probably best classified as an interjection. You British have more complex ones than we do; you have things like "cor" while we limit ourselves mostly to pure vowels and semivowels like "wow." However, we both use profanity as interjections when we're really upset, as well as blasphemous religious terms. Sometimes all combined together into complicated polysyllabic constructions like g** d*** m***** f***ing s** of a b****, apparently one of the first phrases Americans learn as children.

    Whether you call an interjection a "word" is a fine point and I don't know how the professionals rule on that. What matters in the context of translation is that interjections express feelings more than denotative meaning. Even the eight-word compound above means nothing except, "I'm feeling a lot of pain and/or anger."

    The tell is that tone matters a lot with interjections. "Oh" can mean "now I understand," "I don't understand at all," "what a surprise," "I was expecting that," "I'd like to hear more about that," "I never want to hear about that again," and many other things, depending on the tone.

    Your two-syllable interjection apparently has a specific meaning, but you make it clear that it has to bear a specific combination of tones in order to carry that meaning. Tone is not phonemic in English, so I'd be reluctant to classify it as a word.

    As to whether it needs to be translated... hmm. With a rising tone on the short first syllable and falling tone on the longer second syllable, I feel like I would get the basic connotation of "now I understand," but the long "ah" with the falling tone does that all by itself. I would not pick up the subtleties you add.

    So I don't think a speaker of another language would understand it fully. Still, I don't know how you would go about translating it. Every language community has different interjections.

    Sitting here grunting to myself experimentally, providing my dogs with great entertainment, I think would probably express that sentiment using the same tones, but on a constant "oh," and about three times faster. And I would finish on a lower tone than I started. All right, let's take this to the piano. It's A, C, low E.
     
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  5. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Fraggle. The phrase is said with a nasal Birmingham accent (which doesn't help, if you are not familiar with it), and the aaaaaah goes up and down while falling. It is quite sing-songy.
    The sound contains a status signal, and is a sound of conciliation which puts you socially beneath the other person at least for a short time. It is like the emoticon with the waving white flag, or a dog showing its belly. A very useful sound.
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No, like most Americans I recognize only Cockney, which is much more than just an accent, and Oxford, which some say is a deliberately crafted pronunciation. The Beatles, Monty Python, Wallace & Gromit, Robbie Williams and everyone else fall somewhere in between but we don't catch the subtleties.
    Aha, the essence of non-tonal languages. We use tone as a separate bandwidth for communicating non-verbal messages. The Chinese find this quite strange, since they grow up regarding tone as phonemic. They think of themselves as more articulate than us, because if they want someone to know how they feel, they have to be able to put it precisely in words instead of "growling and whining like drunken chimpanzees" as one friend put it.

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  8. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Yes it's an amusing sounding and sociable word. If you are in the right place you will hear it in a friendly discussion quite often. In this country , we find the Birmingham accent amusing, so maybe this is a factor. You'll have to find yourself a brummy. They get about, so shouldn't be too hard. As regards this thread- Any Brummies out there! Speak up! "yowl be disgraced!"
     
  9. redarmy11 Registered Senior Member

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  10. Nickelodeon Banned Banned

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    Ever been to Dudley? Thats the worst (or best?) example.
     
  11. redarmy11 Registered Senior Member

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    Doodloooii?

    No, can't say I have.
     
  12. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    It's actually used throughout much of the U.S. as well. It's sort of a contraction of the two statements, "Oh, yes" and "Ahhh, yes!" being melded together. Every single individual I know (and that's hundreds) all recognize the meaning immediately. It's much like, "NOW I understand - and you're exactly right."

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  13. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Well done Red army, Barrie from "aus wiedersehn" is a perfect example. There is definitely a prejudice against the Birmingham accent, and people think that Brummies are thick. If Steven Hawking had a Brummie voice generator, no-one would take him seriously.

    And yes, Read only, it could just be "ah yes" in a black country accent. It can be said in much the same way. Aah Yeeeees!

    Yer roight there mate, Oooh aaaaaaah!
     
  14. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Read only. You not only could be right, you are right. Thinking about it, the Brummie word aah means yes. so ooh aaaaaah is the equivallent of ooh yeeeeees, in which the final word goes up and down while falling.
    What is the American equivalent of the Black Country, ie old heavy industry town, and do they have an accent that people find amusing.
     
  15. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    We've got several pockets of local accents but perhaps the best example of what you're asking about would be the hill/mountain region of Appalachia. It contains some rather isolated sections and pretty much the only major industry is coal mining. There are families in that region that have been miners for generations.

    While they can still be understood by most other Americans with little or no trouble, the accent is certainly not mainstream and they have some words and phrases that just aren't found anywhere else. The rest of the country tends to label them as "hillbillies", "mountain people", and "back-woodsy."

    Our old heavy industry towns - like Pittsburgh, Birmingham Alabama, and all along the Eastern Seaboard (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, etc.) are still very much mainstream as far as language goes.

    Up in the extreme Northeast (Maine, etc.) you'll find another group that has retained many Scottish words and phrases - now they CAN be difficult to understand when listening to two or three of them having a conversation.
     
  16. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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  17. Ghost_007 Registered Senior Member

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    lol. I don't think the accent is too bad. I can put up with it for about a day.

    To be honest, I hate Londoners (those my age) the most. The way they speak, their slang, walk, dress etc.

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  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Having lived almost entirely in the West, I haven't run into enough British people to really sort out the various regional accents. I hear some telltales that distinguish it. Pronouncing "way" as "why," that sounds "Austrylian." And "doo-unt" for "don't," that's Jamaican.
     
  19. Smellsniffsniff Gravitomagnetism Heats the Sun Registered Senior Member

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    åååh, aaah! Means the exact same thing in sweden.
     
  20. Ripley Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, oui oui. —Mais, bien sûr alors!
     
  21. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Barry saying ooh aaaaaah

    ....and Pot Noodles.
    Hope the viewers of this thread have been doing their homework and watching the course material. I've found another clip, where Barry says a short version of ooh aaaaaah, almost at the end of the clip.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcKUGGzqNeI
     
  22. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    A song called "Ooh aah" by hip-hoppers the Grits contains this.


    [Hook]
    My life be like
    Ooh Aah (yeah), Ooh Ooh
    My life be like (yeah)
    Ooh Aah, Ooh Aah (yeah), Ooh Ooh
    Ooh Aah (yeah), Ooh Ooh
    My life be like (yeah)
    Ooh Aah, Ooh Aah (yeah), Ooh Ooh
    My life be like (yeah)
     
  23. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    And in Scotland, Och Aye, but there it means the opposite: " That's right, but you aren't telling me anything I didn't know already".
     

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