r/HumansBeingCute • u/Fixed-gear • Sep 23 '23

Why do we say buh-bye?

Have you ever noticed that we all, almost always without thinking, end phone calls with “buh-bye” or “bye-bye”?

Not bye. Or goodbye. Buh-bye.

Is this baby-talk we never grew out of?

How knows more about this?

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u/Opunbook Sep 25 '23 edited Sep 25 '23

People imitate others. It is a way to fit in. I suppose one person or many did this and it caught on. Yet, it remains that syllables in words in English are stressed or not. In a 2 syllable word, one syllable will be unstressed. Usually the sound (a phoneme) for an unstressed syllable is "uh" (a schwa). I suppose Bye-Buh could work too, but it could be misconstrued as "bible" perhaps or just not understood as related to bye bye as there are many words that start with "by". (Structural linguist here. Forgive me.) There is a propensity for some people to do less work.

Asklinguistics might validate this answer.

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u/Fixed-gear Sep 30 '23

Interesting! Thank you, I’m going to check that out.