 Ngaio Marsh |
I have just finished reading False Scent, a whodunnit by the New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982). The novel was first published in 1960. One of the characters is a 60-year-old retired colonel called Warrender. Very soon after his appearance there comes this:
Warrender gave him a brief look. ‘Early days to settle into a routine, isn’t it?’ he said surprisingly. ‘Leave that to the old hands, isn’t it?’ He had a trick of ending his remarks with this colloquialism.
And indeed throughout the rest of the book the colonel uses the phrase “isn’t it?” as an invariant question tag, rather than repeating the antecedent auxiliary verb in the normal way. I have never come across this before. Urban youth in recent years use “innit”, but a crusty old army officer in the 1960s? Can anyone throw any light on this? Maybe Ngaio Marsh got hold of the wrong end of some stick or other, but I doubt it.
I have found this in systematic use by Afrikaans speakers when speaking English. I haven’t noticed it in any other context (including Anglophone South Africans), not counting “innit” as equivalent, anyway.
One of my managers at the BBC had a Sri Lankan secretary whose English was a rather exaggerated RP. She would then completely confuse me by ringing to ask “You will be coming to this meeting, isn’t it?” Is English the only language to have so many tag question forms? “Innit” presumably originated with immigrant youths whose native language had only the one form.
I don’t know of any language where tag questions are as complex as English. The Celtic languages have a somewhat simpler system which does echo the verb of the main clause. An example from Irish:
Is maith leat tae, nach maith?
Literally, “It is good with you tea, is it not good?”
That is, “You like tea, don’t you?”