28 December 2015

Echoes of the Distant Past: Fossil Reduplications

Modern English has its normal share of nursery words, colloquial interjections, and miscellaneous other onomatopoeic or expressive words involving sound-repetition: daddy, baby, nanny, sissy, pee-pee, bye-bye, ta-ta, goody-goody, ding-dong, pop, riff-raff, hip-hop, bow-wow, cuckoo, hurdy-gurdy, tic-tac-toe, bubble, giggle, mumble, google, etc. English also has reduplicative words borrowed from other languages: dodo, can-can, dum-dum, yo-yo. Some of such imports are old and their reduplicative status is no longer obvious to non-specialists: barbarian, purple, turtle-dove. A few echoic words exhibiting a repetitive pattern are at least as old as the English language, whatever their ultimate origin; cock and chicken belong here.

Traces left by a reduplication
[Source: Beentree/Wikipedia CC]
Note, however, that the words listed above are not derived by reduplication. For example, giggle cannot be traced back to a simpler verb with only one occurrence of /ɡ/. In the overwhelming majority of cases the repetition is merely phonetic, not morphological. Reduplication in the proper sense of the word (involving a base and an echo) is not used in English to perform any of its typical, cross-linguistically common tasks, such as the formation of plural or collective nouns, verb stems of a particular aspect or tense, intensive verbs or adjectives, deverbal nouns, etc. This is one of those things that make English, together with some other languages of the northerly latitudes, a little weird.

Interestingly, morphological reduplication is given looser rein in some English-based creole languages, for example in Tok Pisin, where it seems to be on the rise as a derivational device  – presumably as a result of contact with the heavily reduplicating indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea. Here are some examples:
kala ‘colour’ → kalakala ‘colourful’
bruk ‘break, fall apart’ → brukbruk ‘fall apart into many small pieces’
pilai ‘play’ → pilaipilai ‘play round’
ron ‘run’ → ronron ‘keep running’
tok ‘talk’ → toktok ‘conversation’
wil ‘wheel’ → wilwil ‘bicycle’¹
Has English preserved any really old reduplications, with cognates in other branches of the Indo-European family? Yes, but there are only a handful left, and most of them show no transparent reduplicative structure any longer. Among those relics there are at least two nouns, wheel and beaver (probably also tetter ‘skin disease’), one adjective, quick (provided that my etymology of PIE *gʷih₃wó- ‘living’ in Gąsiorowski 2007 is correct), and two verbs in the past tense, ate and did. Despite the fact that the two irregular past tenses represent the same modern category, they go back to different Indo-European verb forms, characterised by different reduplication patterns. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the regular past-tense ending – and not just the -d of loved, watched, waited, but also the -t/-d of kept, brought, sold – vaguely reflects an ancient reduplication as well, and has in fact the same origin as did. I will trace these connections later in this series.


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¹ Since wil = Eng. wheel, which itself is an old reduplicated noun, Tok Pisin wilwil is a quadruplication, etymologically speaking.

17 comments:

  1. A few echoic words exhibiting a repetitive pattern are at least as old as the English language, whatever their ultimate origin; cock and chicken belong here.

    Cock is obviously French coq. Chicken, though, has a Germanic pedigree: German Küken "chick". (...That must be Low German, though. The properly consonant-shifted version is hidden in the diminutive Küchlein, which I only know from reading.)

    quadruplication

    rereduplication
    redupliduplication
    :-)

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    1. Cock is obviously French coq

      I wouldn't be so sure, given OE cocc and ON kokkr. If it's a borrowing from Romance, it must be a very old one. Slavic kokotъ shows that such "ko(k)ko" onomatopoeia can be coined independently, just like the various 'cuckoo' words.

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    2. The Finnish loanword kukko additionally demonstrates that the word's been in Germanic already before Northwest Germanic a-umlaut.

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    3. And it need not be onomatopoeic. Cocks have crests (technically "combs") indicating their alpha-male status (much like Donald Trump's pompadour). Germanic *kukka- applied to the male fowl could simply mean 'crested' i.e. 'heaped up, pointed with regard to the head', continuing PIE *gugʱ-nó- by Kluge's Law. OE cocc 'cock' would then be identical to the place-name element -cocc 'pointy hill(?)'. OHG coccho, NHG dial. Kocke 'cone-shaped pile, dungheap, haycock' would simply be the weak masc. substantivization of the same stem 'heaped up to a point'. Lith. gugà 'bump, knot in wood, hillock, withers (i.e. the peak of a horse's back)' and gaũgaras 'mountaintop' would also be derived from PIE *geugʱ- 'to heap up, form a peak' vel sim. in this view. Presumably Pol. guga 'bump' and (indirectly) Russ. dial. gúglja 'id'. are borrowed from Lith. gugà.

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  2. In Basque also there are plenty of lexicalized reduplications, some of them apparently from onomatopoeias: tximist (< txist-mist) 'lightning', ika-mika 'argument', esamesa 'rumour' (cf. esan 'to say'), arnas 'breath(ing)' (< *(h)asnas; cf. hats 'breath'), zezen 'bull' (probably related to the first part of zekor 'calf'), gogor 'hard' (cf. gor 'deaf', gordin 'raw, crude')...

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    1. While reduplication is an expressive feature, the lexemes themselves aren't necessarily onomatopoeic. Many people -including some professional linguistic- tend to confuse expressive features with an onomatopoeic (phonosymbolic) origin.

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    2. Sorry, I meant "linguists", not "linguistic".

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    3. I said SOME, and FROM: obviously, the only probable onomatopoeic element in my list is txist...

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    4. Not necessarily so, although the initial affricate is expressive. Compare the forms disti, distira 'shine, sparkle' which aren't expressive. Likewise, we've got Spanish chorro 'stream, jet' (expressive) vs. Basque iturri 'spring' (not expressive).

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    5. Expressive palatalization is very common in Basque, but I'm not sure it was also expressive in Romance, especially considering the source language of the these words isn't Basque.

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  3. I look forward to your telling the story of English "-(e)d" (and Latin "-tus, -ta, -tum") -- it reminds me of the "aha" moment when I realized that Romance future suffixes are just the infinitive with forms of "have" stuck on the end -- e.g., Spanish "hablaré" (I will speak) from "hablar he" = literallly, I have to speak (with, perhaps at one time, even some of the same sense of obligation or inevitability this construction conveys in Modern English).

    Meanwhile, could you help us find the details of the etymology of "ate"? You mentioned it in your short list of English words with reduplication in their past. I found the roots of "beaver" easily (basically, "bear bear" or "brown brown"), but I couldn't find anything on "ate." Thank you!

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    1. The past tense of Germmanic "strong verbs" mostly continues the PIE perfect, which was nearly always reduplicated in the following way: *bʰe-bʰóid- (sg.)/*bʰé-bʰid- (pl.) for the root *bʰeid- 'split, bite'. The reduplication was generally abandoned in Germanic, though a number of verbs kept it, especially in Gothic. In Old English, for example, it gives us bāt/biton as the 3sg./pl. preterite forms of bītan 'bite'.

      The PIE root meaning 'eat' was *h₁ed-; the initial consonant was probably the same as in English head. The perfect stem was *h₁e-h₁ód-/*h₁é-h₁d-. As a result of the loss of the laryngeals, both stem variants developed regularly (without de-reduplication) into Proto-Germanic *ēt-, which is why the past tense of OE etan 'eat' is ǣt/ǣton. These forms are ancestral to Modern English ate. They developed into Middle English [ɛːt(ə)], but the vowel was often shortened because of the analogical influence of "weak" past-tense forms like led, read, hence the modern short-vowel variant [ɛt]. The variants [eɪt] and (dialectal) [iːt] are more straightforward reflexes of the OE preterite.

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  4. Thank you for generously replying in such a clear, complete, and prompt manner. I dimly recall some Latin principal parts with a reduplicated preterite -- e.g., "pello, pellere, pepulli"...and "do, dare, dedi," which brings us back to the subject of your upcoming observations on the English past tense marker and related forms.

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  5. Silly me...while Latin "dedi" indeed demonstrates reduplication, it is, of course, "facere" which derives from PIE *dhe-. I'll keep quiet and leave the experts to tell the stories...

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  6. Update for those who read these comments before seeing Piotr's late-January-2016 blog entries: according to Piotr, "beaver" is neither "bear-bear" nor "brown-brown," but rather "carrying habitually." Well, that actually IS "bear-bear," just not the one most etymological dictionaries have in mind.

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    1. Piotr's etymology isn't particularly compelling for me. That is, the reduplicated lexeme could be simply homonymous to the verb 'to bear' but actually have a different meaning.

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