Reduplication

[David Gil]

Giorgio's post reminds me that (partially or completely) reduplicated 
nicknames are very common in the languages of the Philippines and 
Indonesia, eg. Tagalog "noynoy" ultimately from Spanish 'Benigno'.  
Often such reduplication has a kind of ideophonic flavour, violating the 
regular phonotactics of the language, eg. Minangkabau "?a?ã" (nickname 
of unknown origin).  Reduplication is also common with kinship terms in 
the region, eg. Malay/Indonesian "kaka(?)" for 'elder sibling'.  And 
then there is baby-talk reduplication for bodily functions, eg. 
Malay/Indonesian "?e?e" or "?o?o" for 'poopoo'.

As suggested by 'poopoo', none of these are specific to East or 
Southeast Asia; they are all cross-linguistically widespread.  Somewhat 
further afield (semantically), reduplication is known to commonly 
express notions of atelicity, attenuation, and playful imitation, which 
would seem to constitute plausible sources for the development of a 
diminutive meaning.


> Dear Scott,
>
> I have the impression that this is a fairly common pattern in Sinitic 
> - I can think of Standard Mandarin examples like gou-gou (sorry, no 
> tone markers) 'dog-dog = doggie'. Also, almost all kinship terms are 
> reduplicated forms (ma-ma, ge-ge, mei-mei, etc.); I venture to guess 
> that they started out as reduplicated diminutive forms (maybe from 
> child language?). However, the dog-dog pattern exemplified above is 
> not really productive (you can do that only with a very small set of 
> nouns).
>
> Best.
>
> Giorgio F. Arcodia
>

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

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