#Reduplicatives

[red-fox-education]

Double the Fun with Reduplicatives – Learn English Playfully!

📄 Description: This vibrant educational poster by RedFox Education showcases the concept of Reduplicatives — playful English words like tick-tock, chit-chat, and flip-flop that repeat or twist sounds for extra fun and memorability. Perfect for English learners and educators who love turning language learning into an exciting experience.

🔸 Designed for social learning 🔸 Great for ESL/Spoken English content 🔸 Ideal for Instagram, Pinterest & classrooms

Learn more at: www.redfoxeducation.com

[linguisticdiscovery]

shm-reduplication

You know when you repeat a word but start it with shm instead of the original letter to be ironic, sarcastic, or derisive?

Like the U.S. congress might say, “Budget? What budget? Budget shmudget.”

This is called shm-reduplication, and English borrowed this construction from Yiddish!

When a language has a regular grammatical process whereby a word or part of a word is repeated to form a new meaning, this is called reduplication.

Here’s a fun article from the Atlantic about shm-reduplication:

If you want to learn more about Yiddish, a really fun and informative book on the topic is Born to Kvetch: Yiddish language and culture in all its moods:

[ranahan]

re- in Mando’a?

So I’ve been wondering how to translate words like redo and rebirth into Mando’a. I’ve seen some Fando’a words to that extent that have been formed with the prefix tu’, formed from tugyc, ‘again’. However, I have another proposal:

Reduplication, as seen in the word repeat: ta’tugir. Broken down that’s tu~tug-ir, i.e. tu (the reduplicated part, n.b. the vowel has changed) + *tug- (the root) + the verbal suffix (to turn it into a verb).

So rebirth would be go’goten or maybe go’gotal(ur, or perphaps go’gotalan?), literally “remaking, reforging,” and to redo would be na’narir, va’vaabir or go’gotalur.

If you wonder why reduplication would make perfect semantic sense, I have a post about it here.

[elucubrare]

did i get any real writing done today? no. did i decide on how they form plural nouns? yes.

[pfffsfic]

what is a cancellationgation. I first read it as “cancellongation”, cancellation+elongation, but that’s not what it is on closer inspection, so ?

[pitchcom]

THE CHARLES MONACO WIN BLACK PARADE ANIMATIC IS DONE.

im not a very good artist LOL but i was struck by a vision after the monaco win and i felt compelled to at least give it some kind of form and now AGES LATER the vision is complete <33

under the cut is some panels i was gonna draw during the instrumental bit but got too tired to add:

[vimflam]

extremely fun reduplication sounds in this notif

[sepdet]

back to Cezanne for shits and giggles

(Note to self: Naples yellow undertint. Main titanium white + viridian green, prussian blue, cad yellow med, alizarin red, raw sienna)

[bmpmp3]

actually speaking of my name, dara, its like fun because it is just 2 very simple syllables so its in all kinds of languages all across the world as a name and as a word. and like. okay usually it means something super nice like super wise or like a gift or like a leader or awesome tree or awesome pearl or rich or fortunate or whatever, stuff like that. so lemme tell you how awesome it was when i found out in some dialects of japanese it means idiot <3

[bookwyrminspiration]

staring at the data frowning and sulking and stomping my feet because I KNOW what the language is doing i just don't know how to properly chart/gloss it </3

[thelingering]

TIMEE.... is changeee......

[ranahan]

Reduplication in Mando’a

Reduplication is fairly common amongst the world’s languages, though the Indo-European languages don’t do it so it may be unfamiliar to Europeans. What it means is simply repeating a part of the stem. Reduplication is a derivation just like any other, so it has predictable form (it’s not any random part that repeats) and meaning (just like other affixes share a general sense of how they modify the stem, so does reduplication—however, derivations can and often do veer off from the original sense considerably).

What reduplication in Mando’a looks like

Reduplication in Mando’a takes the form of a prefix:

1. In stems beginning with a consonant, the prefix is CV-

2. In stems beginning with a vowel, the prefix is VC-

Where C can be a consonant or a consonant cluster and V can be a vowel (short or long) or a diphthong. For example:

CV- reduplications:

sol > sosol

shuk > shu’shuk

briik > brii’briik

VC- reduplications:

ad > adade (adad-e, plural form)

The vowel in the prefix may dissimilate, like in other Mando’a affixes. For example: tug > ta’tugir.

CV(C) and VC are the most common syllable types, but there are a few roots/words that are VV (for example aai). There aren’t any canon examples of how to reduplicate those, but I’d hazard a guess that the prefix could be VV (e.g. *aai’aai, which is a bit long so maybe that would get chopped down to *ai’ai or something).

What reduplication in Mando’a means

Here Mando’a doesn’t do anything fancy—reduplication in Mando’a has two senses, which are cross-linguistically the most common ones amongst the world’s languages:

1. Iterative

Iterative reduplications are ones where the meaning itself is a repeating action or an increase in number.

For example:

ad, ‘child, person’ > adade, ‘personnel’ (a bit funny one, since it’s technically a double plural)

briik, ‘line’ > brii’briik, ‘grid’

*tug-, ‘again, repeat’ > ta’tugir, ‘repeat’

*sol-, ‘one, number’ > sosol, ‘equal’

buir, ‘parent’ > ba’buir, ‘grandparent’ (possibly, although this could also be bah-buir, cf. ba’vodu)

2. Intensive

Intensive reduplications are ones where the meaning is intensified, for example:

shuk, ‘rift, tear’ > shu’shuk, ‘disaster’

yai, ‘belly, womb’ > yai’yai, ‘richly nourishing’

Most reduplications in Mando’a are nouns, but sosol and yai’yai are adjectives, so both are possible. Reduplications themselves can then be used to derive other words, for example slap a verbal suffix -Vr on and you get a verb.

Bonus: non-canon reduplications

Here’s a few examples of how you can use reduplication to derive your own words:

*sen-, ‘fly (action)’ > sesen, ‘fly (an insect)’ (could have the sense of “lots of flying things”—when do they ever appear one by one?—or ��to fly/flutter/buzz around repeatedly”)

rud, ‘around’ > rarud, ‘spiral, helix’

dul, ‘half’ > dadul, ‘quarter’ (can’t claim the glory for this one: it was first coined by Tal’jair, then tweaked by Tuuri, then further tweaked by me—I liked dadul over dudul, but tbh either would be fine)

shonar, ‘wave’ > sho’shonar, ‘surf, waves’ (could equally well be *shonare, or maybe even *sho’shon; I liked the repeating sound like waves beating the shore)

Post more in the comments/replies!

[nilesmoon]

they want enstars to have a nurude sasara SO BAD

[arbitrarity]

ooo it's interesting that there are so many different meanings of reduplication even just in this post

(k sorry for the ramble. I usually just post my responses to stuff like this that @ihasafandom sends me on here in our personal chat, but this one got long. plus ihasa sometimes says I should post some of my long rambles, so why not :P also I am taking a quick break from re-writing a school paper and so I am both wanting distraction and easily in writing-mode, so this is what happened. oops!)

"like" vs. "like like" = distinguishing between two meanings of the word, platonic liking and romantic liking.

"spicy spicy" and "fancy fancy", on the other hand, I feel like is reduplication contrasting intensity, based on subjective interpretation of those words. but where like "is it spicy/fancy based on a more broad definition of what that means, or would it still be considered spicy/fancy to someone who's used to spicy/fancy things?" i feel like it's not solely intensification because "spicey-spicey" is greater than the first instance of "spicy" in the same sentence, which is now less-than, but they are both encompassed within the broader term "spicy". and that feels different to the first example with "like", which doesn't seem to me to simply contrast "like me a little" vs. "like me a lot".

then the "milk milk" idea is similarly referring to a subset of the larger set of all things that are encompassed by the same meaning of "milk", but instead of being more "intense" it is more prototypical - more 'milk-like' - as pointed out by allthingslinguistic

Is the Bantu example of "REAL leg" the same? it's hard to tell what "real" could mean here. is it contrasting something more typically leg-like to something less so? or is there maybe a distinction of animacy -- contrasting between "human/animal leg" versus like "table leg"? that difference could also instead be 'real' vs. 'metaphorical', where the second is serving a leg-like function, but isn't technically a leg. I wonder. that's sort of like the 'prototypical' meaning of reduplication, but still slightly different if its 'real' vs. 'metaphorical/has x-like characteristics'.

then we get into those three modifications on english reduplication. the baby-talk doesn't seem to have any meaning difference, just an audience-direction one. the rhyming stuff "teeny weeny" and "super-duper" are straight intensification. while the "fancy-smanshy" is dismissive of the first part. so interesting! languages are weird :D

So you know what I don’t get? Why people repeat words. (x)

[justsayyesmiss]

[v-a-t-i-o]

this is fascinating to me. was trying to look up malay "cup cup" and this was the best i got. but like. so cool this exists all around the world