What is the history of using the word "say" to start a sentence?
An example is from Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) -- "Oh, shucks, I'll be just as careful. Now lemme try. Say—I'll give you the core of my apple."
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I think I already answered this here; ironically the question asks about say ending a sentence.– Laurel ♦Commented Nov 23, 2017 at 1:43
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1Possible duplicate of what is the origin of caricatured gangsters using "say?" to end sentences?– jimm101Commented Nov 23, 2017 at 1:49
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4@Laurel - My gut feel is that "Say" starting a sentence is generally different in meaning and etymology from "say" ending a sentence. The typical use of "say" ending a sentence is short for the rhetorical question "what say you". "Say" starting a sentence is no doubt a shortened form of some expression, possibly along the lines of "What would you say if" (which does not mean the same as "what say you").– Hot LicksCommented Nov 23, 2017 at 1:53
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What's special about using the word say to start a sentence? Suppose, Consider, What if, ....– KrisCommented Nov 26, 2017 at 9:36
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The Germans also do this "Sag mal..." and this is cognate. The French do a similar thing "Dis donc, ...." which is not cognate, but could be a loan translation. But either way the phenomenon is not restricted to English.– MitchCommented Jun 16, 2018 at 21:08
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1 Answer
Using an ngram, we can compare the relative occurrence of say at the beginning and ending of sentences in books. According to this ngram, the first usage of using say at the end of a sentence was around 1689. The first recorded use of say to begin a sentence, however, was much earlier, around 1560.
We can also see that there are a substantial (relative to the overall occurrence of say at the beginning and ending of sentences) number of sentences beginning with say even before the one ending with say is first observed. After that, the number of sentences starting with say seems to be much larger, relatively speaking. To observe that, I suggest looking at this n-gram (1670 till 1800).
I also looked at the n-gram from 1600 till 1900 of the following words starting a sentence: say, suppose, consider, what and if, which shows that of those, if and what are used the most (by a lot). When removing those two, the remaining three seem to occur in the same order of magnitude.
Regarding the actual texts in which those words occurred, that cannot be observed from the n-grams. Nevertheless, I hope the graphs offer some interesting perspective on the matter.
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It is unfortunate that Ngram does not show the "hits", so we cannot evaluate the frequency of "Say, ..." vs "Say 'mother may I'". Commented Jul 17, 2018 at 2:15