A Reduplication Manual for Drivers, Metalworkers, and Birdwatchers

The case of *kʷékʷlo- is relatively clear, perhaps because the word is not as old as some other Indo-European vocabulary, and its derivation from a verb root is at least semi-transparent. The same goes for several other reduplications with the same structure (echo + known root in zero-grade + thematic vowel). Unlike *kʷékʷlo-, they are less securely attested, appearing only in one or two branches of Indo-European. For example, Latin aurum ‘gold’ has a nice Baltic cognate, Lith áuksas (dialectal áusas).  A careful comparison of these words, taking into acount the Baltic tonal accent, leads to the reconstruction *h₂áh₂uso- (= *h₂é-h₂us-o-, originally neuter, as in Latin) for the common ancestor of Italic and Baltic.[1] The verb root here is *h₂wes- ‘light up, dawn’. Gold is therefore “that which glitters”, and we can speculate that the reduplication symbolically suggests the intermittent flickering of reflected light.

Another interesting example, this time restricted to Baltic and Slavic, is the word for ‘cuckoo’: Lith. gegužė̃, Old Russian zegzica, žеgъzuľa (< Proto-Slavic *žеgъzа, extended with various suffixes).[2] The ancestral Balto-Slavic form can be reconstructed as *geguźaH. Because of its tongue-twisting, repetitious consonant pattern the word is often “explained” as onomatopoeic, though it bears little actual resemblance to any noise characteristic of the common cuckoo. If, however, we try to analyse it as a *kʷékʷlo-type reduplication and travel back in time beyond Proto-Balto-Slavic , its structure becomes clearer: *gʰegʰuǵʰah₂ (= *gʰe-gʰuǵʰ-e-h₂), a feminine noun based on the verb root *gʰeuǵʰ- ‘hide’ (known from Indo-Iranian and Baltic). I’ll leave open the question whether the Balto-Slavs dubbed the cuckoo “the hiding one” because it is notorious for hiding its eggs in other birds’ nests, or because it’s frequently heard but almost never seen:

          No bird, but an invisible thing,
          A voice, a mystery. [3]

Both explanations make enough sense to justify the etymology.[4]

A strange reduplication hiding in a reed warbler’s nest.

Let us use the following shorthand notation: R is a root morpheme and E is its reduplicative echo (filling a CV template). The vocalism of a morpheme will be shown in brackets: R(ø) means a root in zero-grade (without a vowel), E(e) means an echo in e-grade, and E(é) means that the e-grade echo is accented. A *kʷékʷlo-type derivative can be defined as follows: E(é)-R(ø)-o-. The accent was shifted to the thematic ending when an o-stem formed a collective, and it’s possible that the vowel of the echo was phonetically weakened as a result, yielding E(ə)-R(ø)-é-h₂,  but this was a superficial change, easy to reverse by analogically restoring the full vowel of the singular. Note that while ‘wheels’ often occur as a specific set, ‘gold’ is an uncountable mass noun and ‘cuckoos’ do not form natural assemblies. Therefore, of the reduplicated words discussed so far, only ‘wheel’ had a frequently used collective form.

The “thematic” suffix *-e/o- was very productive in the formation of adjectival derivatives. Proto-Indo-European adjectives had the same patterns of declension, and adjectives could be substantivised (converted into nouns) by so-called “internal derivation”: not by suffixation, but by modifying the accent or vocalism. Many thematic nouns must have originated as adjectives turned into nouns simply by retracting  their accent from the thematic vowel. If this happened after the period of dramatic vowel changes – strongly sensitive to the location of stress – which produced the Indo-European ablaut patterns, the accent retraction did not affect the vocalism of the adjective. Some nouns retracted their accent just because they were nouns, even if thy had no adjectival counterpart.[5] When such a derivational pattern became productive, reduplicated thematic nouns could be formed from verb roots directly, skipping the adjectival stage, but the meaning of the noun was still “descriptive”, referring to a characteristic action carried out in an iterative or frequentative manner (“turning round and round”, “flashing again or again”, “hiding habitually”).

Since we have examples of E(é)-R(ø)-o- from both Anatolian and Core Indo-European, the type must have originated already in Proto-Indo-European; but given the limited distribution of most of the nouns formed in this way, they were probably coined at the “dialectal” stage, when the descendants of Proto-Indo-European were already diverging into distinct languages. Younger derivatives are typically more transparent and less irregular than old ones – which is precisely what makes their derivation productive. In the next post, I shall try to argue that an older layer of reduplicated nouns, less transparent and harder to analyse, can also be identified.

[REDUPLICATION: back to the table of contents]

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[1] Michiel C. Driessen. 2003. *h₂é-h₂us-o-, the Proto-Indo-European term for “gold”. Journal of Indo-European Studies 31, 347–362.

[2] The accumulation of stops and fricatives makes the word prone to phonological distortion, so the ancestral sequence ž…gz may change into ž…gž, z…gz, z…z or gž…gž by assimilation at a distance. The Modern Polish word for ‘cuckoo’ is kukułka (an onomatopoeic innovation with a different kind of reduplication), but conservative forms, such as zazula and gżegżółka, have survived in regional dialects. Most Poles remember the funny-looking word gżegżółka (pronounced [gʐɛˈgʐuwka]) from the classroom spelling-tests they were tortured with in their school days. They may dimly recall that it referred to some sort of bird. Schoolteachers, however, rarely explain which bird it is – they probably aren’t sure themselves. Gżegżółka has therefore become  an interesting example of a word which has no real communicative function but has been co-opted for a marginal social use (testing schoolchildren’s orthographic memory). See zyzzyva for a similar phenomenon.

[3] William Wordsworth, To the Cuckoo.

[4] The idea is mine, but you are free to share it as long as you credit your source. It has the additional advantage of making it possible to connect Balto-Slavic *geguźaH with the Proto-Germanic word for ‘cuckoo’, *ɣaukaz, on solid formal grounds. The similarity between them has been noticed before, but mere similarity means little without a detailed morphological analysis.

[5] Note that many PIE thematic nouns were accented on a zero-grade syllable, e.g. *h₂ŕ̥tḱos ‘bear’ or *wĺ̥kʷos ‘wolf’.