[Lexicog] Reduplication with sound change

[Peter Kirk]

On 26/09/2004 19:05, John Roberts wrote:

>...
>
>
>
>Reduplication with sound change is also fairly productive in spoken Persian
>(Indo-Iranian) and some examples are: ...
>
>

Another Persian one is harj-marj, meaning "chaos, anarchy".

There are many similar forms (including harj-marj or in the orthography
hərc-mərc, which is in the dictionary) with m- in the second element in
spoken Azerbaijani, which is Turkic but much influenced by Persian. The
meaning as I understand it is not a simple plural but more like "all
kinds of ...". It would seem to be an area characteristic; I have
evidence for that in that I remember hearing such a form in Russian
(unfortunately I forget the exact word) spoken by a native speaker of a
Caucasian language (Udi) in Azerbaijan - although it is not used in
Russian by Russians or by educated Azerbaijanis.

Probable Azerbaijani examples which are in the dictionary:
    çaş- "be confused" - çaşbaş "confused"
    cız "roasting hot" - cız-bız "roasted offal"
    açıq "open" - açıq-saçıq "free and easy, licentious"

But sometimes there is no consonant change, e.g.
    tikə "piece" tikə-tikə "in pieces"
but this merges into a regular way of forming adverbs by reduplication.

There is a second kind of reduplication in Azerbaijani used as an
intensifier especially of colour terms, in which the first consonant and
vowel followed usually by -p- are prefixed to the word, with a slight
variation when the word starts with a vowel. Examples:
    qırmızı "red" - qıpqırmızı "dark red"
    sarı "yellow" - sapsarı "deep yellow"
    qara "black" - qapqara "deep black"
    ağ "white" - ağappaq "snow white" - the ğ to q change is a regular
phonological one

Most of these are in the dictionary.


--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/HKE4lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->


Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/