#ablaut reduplication

[justsayyesmiss]

[bisexualbaker]

Behold, the law that brought us live, laugh, love.

excuse me while i nerd out for a minute

i have five words for you, fellow linguists

The Law of Ablaut Reduplication

Literally the coolest thing EVER

So you know how in English, adjectives have to go in a specific order when placed in front of a noun?

(determiner, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose)

Almost all phrases in English follow this rule. It’s why saying “the brown big dog” sounds weird, but if you change it to “the big brown dog” it sounds fine!

You can see this rule in other phrases such as “cheap red dress” or “round wood table.”

BUT

Some phrases don’t follow this rule! (I know, English is built on rules that aren’t actually rules.)

Think of the Big Bad Wolf. If we apply the adjective order rule, it should be “Bad Big Wolf,” since opinion comes before size. But that sounds weird, right?

That’s because some phrases instead follow the Law of Ablaut Reduplication!

In this law, words are ordered based on the sound. More specifically, they follow this order:

I -> A -> O

That’s why we say things like “flip flop” or “hip hop.”

Or, my personal favorite example, “splish splash splosh.” (i -> a -> o)

Thanks for listening to my rant 🔥🔥

[paizau]

just had a very weird experience. i came up with a new way to derive agent nouns from verbs - the basic nominalized form is object nominalization

for example the word for ball is bön, which is a nominalization of bEn- "to roll", so its literally "rolled thing"

so for agent nominalization I thought of having relative clause of a general head noun followed by a relativized verb and agent nominalization so basically "person who Xes the Xed" => "Xer", and then have the head noun drop

for example päi-ben-bön "person who rolls balls" => ben-bön "ball game player, roller"

also because the only difference between the conjugated form and the nominalization is ablaut of the main vowel in the first conjugation and nothing at all in the second, this creates a very nice reduplication pattern.

NOW, the reason I wrote all of this (beside as an excuse to share this cool idea i had) is that i opened the google sheets file i use to document everything to wirte it down and what do i find???

I LITERALLY ALREADY HAD THIS IDEA AND WROTE IT DOWN, I JUST COMPLETLY FORGOT ABOUT IT!!! WHAT THE FUCKK

[sywmac]

Why ‘tock-tick’ does not sound right to your ears

[quailpower]

Order of Adjectives. Or as I like to call it; one example of why the English language is a fucking nightmare to learn for non natives.

These examples are taken from the Cambridge dictionary website.

1 - opinion (unusual, lovely, beautiful)

2 - size (big, small, tall)

3 - physical quality (thin, rough, untidy)

4 - shape (round, square, rectangular)

5 - age (young, old, youthful)

6 - colour (blue, red, pink)

7 - origin (Dutch, Japanese, Turkish)

8 - material (metal, wood, plastic)

9 - type (general-purpose, four-sided, U-shaped)

10 - purpose (cleaning, hammering, cooking)

It was made of a (1) strange, (6) green, (8) metallic material.

It’s a (2) long, (4) narrow, (8) plastic brush.

Or even:

She was a (1) beautiful, (2) tall, (3) thin, (5) young, (6) black-haired, (7) Scottish woman.

Native English speakers use this order without even thinking about it. So much so, that if you asked them to describe it, they probably wouldn't be able to. But they are instinctively able to tell you if a sentence is using correct or incorrect order. It just sounds wrong.

And it couldn't just be that simple. Take the phrase: big, bad wolf. It sounds right, but doesn't obey the order of adjectives; why?

Adlaut Reduplication

Reduplication is when the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.

It is used to imply plurality, intensify or even derivate from the original meaning and create new words. It makes the tone more expressive or figurative.

Eg. hocus pocus, okey dokey, riff raff, pitter patter, ding ding, fancy schmancy....

"When you shift vowel sounds for effect this way, the vowels always follow a specific order: I, then A, then O. You’d think it was more complicated, that it depended on mood or context, but no, it’s that simple – bosh bash bish."

[palephx]

Want your insults about the Presidon't to have that special zing? Remember this order of linguistic operations.

[happyk44]

[Text ID: Ablaut reduplication is an unwritten English rule that makes "tick-tock" sound normal, but not "tock-tick". When repeating words, the first vowel is always an I, then A or O. "Chit chat" not "chat chit"; "ping pong" not "pong ping", etc. It's unclear why this rule exists but it's never broken. Ultrafacts.tumblr.com /end ID]

Note that the name is accidentally misspelled as "blaut" instead of "abluat".

[rosethyme]

ablaut reduplication is an interesting Language Thing.  I wonder what kind of patterns like that are in other languages?

[chirons-mortar]

Soldier and Lunatic: The Riffraff

I was trying to come up with more villains for Soldier and Lunatic. One of the heroes in the setting is Zigzag who is a speedster hero and a play on "when they zig you zag" as his opposite/complimentary pun. I do not have a lot of ideas for him but I wanted to give him an opponent named Crisscross who could teleport. These words are called "ablaut reduplication" and I ended up looking up a list of them to make a bunch of silly villains. It stretches the setting's duality theme, but I figure they fit in well with the name Zigzag so I am willing to let it slide. I figure they make up Zigzag's rogues gallery but Soldier/Lunatic gets caught up in his adventures so they end up sharing. Below are some of the ones I thought up with varying degrees of seriousness. I am not sold on some, but at the same time I do love the idea of villains with silly names being played straight.

The Riffraff: A group of villains with middle tier superpowers who all have a history with Zigzag. As hero activity increased they decided to band together for mutual protection and cooperation. Note: They are partly inspired by the Flash's Rogues who are a group of weird villains that make up a surprisingly stable and effective team.

Crisscross: Zigzag's arch nemesis who can create portals.

Ticktock: Major nemesis who can pause time.

Knickknack: An inventor who makes odd gadgets.

Clinkclank: A retro robot made by Knickknack.

Singsong: Can control people with hypnotic music.

Tiptop: Can spin at high speeds and generate tornadoes.

Wibblywobbly: Vibrates objects and generates earthquakes.

Flimflam: A magician with the power of illusion.

Pingpong: Wields gimmick ping pong balls.

Splishsplash: Able to swim through air.

Wishwash: Wields a pressurized water gun.

Snipsnap: Wields giant scissor swords.

Mishmash: Able to copy and even mix powers. Possibly some kind of Composite Superman or Frankenstein's monster.

Mustermaster: Possible leader/tactician of the group.

[villainessbian]

That's a very good observation because English loves to repeat stuff (reduplication) with just a small difference - but usually it follows the i-a-o pattern, called Ablaut because it comes from Germanic languages (i then a then o, or i then o, or a then o): think tick tock, tit for tat, or even when things aren't exactly "reduplication": big bad wolf (never bad big wolf)

It should be "silly sally" if we follow the most common case of reduplication, but when it's time to get silly, we get billy

having deep thoughts about the letter b

[a-circle-is-round]

On the secrets of the English language.

[linguisticmaps]

Nonconcatenative morphology

Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.

It may involve apophony (ablaut), transfixation (vowel templates inserted into consonantal roots), reduplication, tone/stress changes, or truncation. 

It is very developed in Semitic, Berber, and Chadic branches of Afro-Asiatic. It also occurs extensively among other language families: Nilo-Saharan, Northeast Caucasian, Na-Dene, Salishan and the isolate Seri (in Mexico).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcatenative_morphology 

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

[...] human nature, but different people are warmed at heart by different things

Archilochus, from ‘Fragment 25′ in Greek Iambic Poetry, trans. Douglas E. Gerber. 

   τις ἀνθρώπου φυή,/ ἀλλ᾿ ἄλλος ἄλλωι καρδίην ἰαίνεται

   ✼ ἰαίνεται, ἰαίνω, to heat, warm; to relax by warmth; (more frequently) to warm, cheer. 

                         ❧

   “You dogs, you thought that I should never again come home from the land of the Trojans, seeing that you wasted my house, and lay with the maidservants by force, and while I was still alive covertly courted my wife, having no fear of the gods, who hold broad heaven, or that any indignation of men would follow. Now over you one and all have the cords of destruction been made fast.

   So he spoke, and at his words pale fear seized them all, and each man gazed about to see how he might escape utter destruction; Eurymachus alone answered him and said:

  If you are indeed Odysseus of Ithaca, come home again, this that you say is just regarding all that the Achaeans have done—many deeds of wanton folly in the halls and many in the field. But he now lies dead who was to blame for everything, namely Antinous; for it was he who set on foot these deeds, not so much through desire or need of the marriage, but with another purpose, which the son of Cronus did not bring to pass for him, that in the land of well-ordered Ithaca he might be king, and might lie in wait for your son and kill him. But now he lies killed, as was his due, but spare the people that are your own; and we will hereafter go about the land and get you recompense for all that has been drunk and eaten in your halls, and will bring in requital, each man for himself, the worth of twenty oxen, and pay you back in bronze and gold until your heart is soothed [εἰς ὅ κε σὸν κῆρ ἰανθῇεἰς, “until thy heart be warmed”, trans. A. T. Murray]; but till then no one could blame you for being wrathful.” 

   (Homer, from Book XXII in Odyssey, lines 35-59, trans. A. T. Murray and George E. Dimock)

                         ❧

  αἶψα μάλ᾿ ἐς στρατὸν ἐλθὲ καὶ υἱέι σῷ ἐπίτειλον·/ σκύζεσθαί οἱ εἰπὲ θεούς, ἐμὲ δ᾿ ἔξοχα πάντων/ ἀθανάτων κεχολῶσθαι, ὅτι φρεσὶ μαινομένῃσιν/ Ἕκτορ᾿ ἔχει παρὰ νηυσὶ κορωνίσιν οὐδ᾿ ἀπέλυσεν,/ αἴ κέν πως ἐμέ τε δείσῃ ἀπό θ᾿ Ἕκτορα λύσῃ./ αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ Πριάμῳ μεγαλήτορι Ἶριν ἐφήσω/ λύσασθαι φίλον υἱόν, ἰόντ᾿ ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν,/ δῶρα δ᾿ Ἀχιλλῆι φερέμεν, τά κε θυμὸν ἰήνῃ.

   “Go quickly to the army and declare to your son my charge. Say to him that the gods are angered with him, and that I above all immortals am filled with wrath, because in the fury of his heart he holds Hector at the beaked ships and gave him not back, in the hope that he may be seized with fear of me and give Hector back. But I will send Iris to great-hearted Priam, to tell him to go to the ships of the Achaeans to ransom his dear son, and to bring gifts to Achilles that will warm his heart. [θυμὸν ἰήνῃ, “make glad his heart”, trans. A. T. Murray]” 

  (Homer, from Book XXIV in Iliad, lines 112-19, trans. A. T. Murray and William F. Wyatt)

   ✼ θυμὸν, θυμός, soul, as the seat of emotion, feeling, and thought; life, breath; will, temper, passion, disposition; from PIE *dʰuh₂mós, smoke, cognate with Proto-Slavic: *dỳmъ—θυμός, Ancient Greek concept of spiritedness (as in a spirited stallion or spirited debate), indicating a physical association with breath or blood, also used to express the human desire for recognition. 

                        ❧

   ✼ ἐλελεῦ, a cry of pain or lament, woe, alas; ἐλελελεῦ, war cry; ὀλολῡ́ζω, (esp. of women) to cry aloud to the gods in prayer or thanksgiving, either with jubilant voice or in lamentation; onomatopoeic reduplicated formation, with the same ending of ἰύζω, to shout, yell; similar formations, genetically cognate or of identical structure, are Latin ululō, to howl, Sanskrit उलूलि (ulūli), a howling, crying aloud, Lithuanian uluti, howl, all with u; beside these stands this verb, with dissimilation ο-υ or perhaps ablauting to ἐλελεῦ, woe, alas.

   “Similar to Giambattista Vico, Herder contrasts grammar with sound, and static form with living contents. The language of the first humans was natural and living, it was not an intellectual gift of God but has been produced by humans themselves [...]

   Insisting on the living character of language as a product of human life, Herder meets the same difficulties as Vico, finding himself confronted with a circular reflection. Vico had asked how man could find his language without knowing already what language is. The first humans could not have agreed on something (on words) which they did not yet know [Sc. N., Sec. 412]. Herder speaks of a ‘Kreisel’ (circle) implying that “without language the human being has no reason, and without reason no language. Without language and reason he is incapable of any divine instruction, and yet without divine instruction he has no reason and language...” [Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin of Language): 121]. A conventional way out of this dilemma would be to postulate that language has been received directly from God, a path taken by Herder's opponent Sussmilch. However, for Herder there is an other solution, which appears in the form of a “divine economy,” a kind of Platonic idea showing man how to make the first step out of primitiveness. In the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit Herder writes: “A divine economy has certainly ruled over the human species from it's first origin, and conducted him into his course the readiest way.” [from Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man: 230] However, the gift of God represents only a directive idea helping man to orientate his mind towards civilization; in their elaborated forms, language and culture should be considered as the works of humans and not as divine gifts: “But the more the human powers have been exercised, the less did they require his superior assistance, or the less were they susceptible of it.” [ibid.]    Herder is uncompromising in maintaining his theory of language as a “natural invention.” He looks for arguments within the conditions of the human mind aside from any ‘outside’ religious inspirations. ‘Besonnenheit’ which corresponds more or less exactly to the term ‘self-reflexivity’ used by contemporary philosophers, implies not only that the subject thinks, but also that it thinks that it thinks: “Certainly as I know that I think, yet know not my thinking faculty; as certainly do I see and feel that I live, though I know now what the vital principle is” [ibid.: 321–22]. Faculties like speaking and thinking could arise only from this self-referring rupture. It is the Besonnenheit which makes possible the logical impossibly of creating within one cultural act a cultural phenomenon like language. Language is not metaphysical or divine at all: “All our science of metaphysics is properly metaphysics, that is an abstracted systematic index of names following observations of experience. As a method, and an index, it may be very useful [...] but considered in itself, and according to the nature of things, it affords not a single perfect and essential idea, not a single intrinsic truth.” [ibid.: 421]” 

   (Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, from ‘'Art', Habitus, and Style in Herder, Humboldt, Hamann, and Vossler- Hermeneutics and Linguistics’)

[paradoxinyourpantshorse]

Reading this was so worth it

[acecademia]

Can you please info dump about what you want to info dump about? (I love seeing other people's info dumps if that makes sense.)

I love you, nonny 💜💜💜

OKAY! SO! Contrastive Reduplication (also known as Contrastive Focus Reduplication or lexical cloning, among others) is this phenomenon where we repeat a word in order to clarify meaning. The example in my previous post was "work-work." I repeated the word "work" in order to clarify that it was something distinct and separate from the schoolwork I had just mentioned. When I said "work-work," I was indicating that I meant work related to my actual job and not a class.

This is something that we do in colloquial English quite frequently, often without even thinking about it. There's a pretty well-known linguistics paper about this that's known as the "salad-salad paper" because they use that as one of their main examples ("It's tuna salad, not SALAD-salad"). We also use it to distinguish types of affection ("Do you LIKE-HIM-like him?") or to differentiate between varying degrees of something ("I'm up, but I'm not UP-up" meaning possibly "I'm awake, but I'm not like out of bed and moving around.").

It's also fairly unique and isn't something that's been observed in many other languages (I think there's only maybe one other language that it's been observed in?). That's not to say that we don't use other forms of reduplication in English or that those forms (and others) aren't present in other languages. There are at least six forms of reduplication.

Think of things like baby talk ("boo-boo," "bye-bye"), rhyme combinations ("super-duper," "okie-dokie"), or what's called "ablaut reduplication" where you repeat a word but with a different vowel sound ("mish-mash," "wishy-washy"). You also might repeat part of or even a whole word for emphasis ("Marcia, Marcia, Marcia"). Sometimes, reduplication changes or clarifies meaning, sometimes it gives emphasis, and sometimes it's just fun to say.

Contrastive reduplication is super fascinating to me because it tends to clarify meaning in relation to a sort of template or ideal version of an object or one that is more familiar to the person you're speaking to. You might be sharing an anecdote with a friend and mention someone named Kate, forgetting for a moment that you know two people named Kate: one who is known to you and was part of your story and a second who is known to both you and the person you're speaking to. So you might say something like "Oh, not KATE-Kate. Work-Kate." to differentiate between the two. The friend you're speaking to is familiar with the non-work-Kate and can then recognize that you mean someone else with the same name.

Does that make sense? It's just like a super fascinating linguistic phenomenon that I get really jazzed about for some reason haha

Reference:

Ghomeshi, J., Jackendoff, R., Rosen, N. et al. Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (The Salad-Salad Paper). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22, 307–357 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:NALA.0000015789.98638.f9

[yeli-renrong]

Jacques, Lai, Antonov and Nima (2017) present, in their sketch grammar of Stau, some diagnostics for the Stau-Khroskyabs group as distinct from Core Rgyalrong:

1) Generalization of the inverse forms in the non-local scenario; complete loss of the direct 3 -> 3′ forms 2) Loss of the nominalization prefixes in favor of suffixes (Stau: S/A -ŋkʰə, P/action -lə, locative -re, instrumental -sce; Khroskyabs: S/A -pɑ / -ŋkʰə, P/action -spi, locative and instrumental -ri) 3) Reduplication with ɑ-ablaut: ŋgə ‘eat’ -> ŋgəŋgɑ ‘eat all kinds of things’ 4) Lexical isoglosses: ‘heart’, ‘smoke’, ‘be big’, ‘bread’, ‘writing’, ‘wind’, ‘skin’, ‘water’, ‘experience’, general classifier, human classifier, ‘exist (animate)’, ‘exist (be put on)’.

They also give some characteristic retentions in contrast with Core Rgyalrong, but these aren’t very useful for Tangut. Out of the five diagnostics:

1) IIRC, Tangut person marking is pretty simplistic, so I haven’t checked this at all.

2) tangut.info lists the nominalizing suffixes L3818 2mer4 (e.g. L367-L3818 examine-NMLZ ‘inspector’, L1770-L3818 take-NMLZ ‘bribe-taker’) and L5165 1twuq1. These don’t look like the Stau or Khroskyabs nominalizers, and seem to have other functions beyond simple nominalization, especially 1twuq1.

Shi and Li 2020 list the nominalizing suffixes lew, sji, and mjijr ( = 2mer4). Naturally, the PDF is mis-encoded, they don’t provide LFW numbers, and the flavor of reconstruction they’re using is horribly unspecified, so it’s hard to say what these should be.

lew: ‘ingest’ -> ‘nourishment’ ‘imbibe’ -> ‘beverage’ ‘wear’ -> ‘clothes’ ‘use’ -> ‘servant’ ‘wear on head’ -> ‘hat’ Potentially related to Stau -lə as in ŋgə ‘eat’ -> ŋgə-lə ‘food’.

sjiː ‘show’ -> ‘evidence, record of examination’ ‘strike’ -> ‘drumstick’ ‘capture’ -> ‘capturing tools’ (??) No obvious Stau or Khroskyabs connection.

mjijr: ‘report’ -> ‘teller, reporter’ ‘steal’ -> ‘thief’ ‘trade’ -> ‘tradesmen, merchants’ But also ‘great’ -> ‘great men’, ‘intellligence’ -> ‘man of wisdom’, so this is pretty clearly the sort of agent nominalizer that has a direct analogue in English ‘-brah’.

One out of three isn’t too bad. However! Eastern Geshiza has a wide variety of nominalizers:

It seems possible that mjijr and sji could be related to -me and -sʰi, so we have potential Stau-Khroskyabs cognates for all the nominalizers I’ve been able to find information on except 1twuq1, which could be a Tangut innovation.

3) No idea.

4) Not great either way:

There’s also this:

Stau/Khroskyabs/Tangut comparisons are from Jacques et al.; the Geshiza column is my addition and probably completely wrong.