It's similar to constructions the OED lists dating back to the sixteenth century.
I noticed while I was in North Yorkshire, most declarative statements were followed with a question - mainly asking if you agreed. As an example, "Michigan sucks, don't you think".
The late Sidney Morgenbesser was a professor of philosophy at Columbia. Well, that don’t hardly say it, as the El Paso sheriff might say in No Country for Old Men. Sidney was the quintessential New York intellectual from the Depression-era Lower East Side, when the Lower East Side was the Lower East Side (no boutiques, hipsters, craft beers, just Katz’s, Schmulka Bernstein’s, Ratner’s, Yonah Schimmel’s). God, do I miss Ratner’s. He was outgoing, witty, argumentative, devoid of pretension, and happy to take on all comers, from cops to Oxbridge dons. I like to think of him as akin to ND’s Frank O’Malley, a scholar far more influential than published. (A dinosaur in modern academia, no?) Oops.
Sidney was a close friend of my CUNY Grad Center mentor David Spitz, so I got to meet him on many occasions. Sidney was enchanted one evening at a whiskey-fueled gathering when, amidst the jokes, I told him that Gaelic* did not really have a single word for “yes.” (An Irishman who learned English would be asked, “Paddy, isn’t it a beautiful day?” Paddy would invariably reply, “Ah, sure an ‘tis.”) He loved that, claiming that as linguistic proof that the Irish were one of the lost tribes. (Yiddish is also a very circuitous, indirect language, perhaps the product of marginal status.)
(Robert Nozick, the great libertarian/anarchist philosopher, and a student of Sidney’s, always said that in college he majored in Morgenbesser.)
Apropos of the absence of “yes” in Gaelic, here’s a Sidney classic. Once, the distinguished Oxford don, philosopher J. L. Austin, came to New York. He was an expert in language. He would frequently lecture on the mutability of words standing alone when divorced from sentences. Or something like that. (It has been a long time.) Hence, “ no” can mean its opposite when attached to the end of what would otherwise be a declarative sentence. “Water is wet, no?”
The story is told that during a lecture at Columbia, Prof. Austin made the claim that even though a double negative in English may impliy a positive meaning (“No, no, after you, I insist.”) there was no language in which a double positive implied a negative. To which Prof. Morgenbesser’s voice, from the back of the auditorium, could be heard stating loudly and in a distinctively New York accent, “Yeah, yeah.”
RIP, Prof. Morgenbesser, I look forward to meeting you again someday in that grand place only one of us half believed in. And if heaven does exist, it will certainly excel in dairy restaurants like Ratner’s, nu, Sidney?
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* To the professional Irishmen out there- To you, it’s “Irish.” To me it was and is “Gaelic.” So sue me. My father’s sister taught Gaelic, not Irish, at the university in Galway and I dreaded her visits because she would quiz me on my Gaelic which would inevitably cause an argument with my mother. Mom grew up semi-Gaeltacht and had about as much use for the language as she did for Irish politics. Farm girls are a hard-headed lot.
('Cause I got a remote for my bidet.)
answers to every question with “So...”
(Sorry I couldn't help it.)
Said every kid near me.
...far more elite.
It just shows you how true it is that one-half of the world doesn't know how the other three-quarters lives, what?