![]() ![]() Second, Word People understand that language should be celebrated! It’s our heritage, and it’s fun! The Unwritten Adjective Rule If you want your pioneering ablaut reduplication to catch on fist-fast, then follow the rule. Wordplayers who want to add fresh ideas to our collective lexicon should pay attention. Are you saying that as television Tim, or TIM-tim?įirst, new words are being created all the time.Ĭontrastive focus reduplication uses stressed repetition to highlight the distinction between a noun’s essence and its literal state: It expresses indifference by pairing a word with a made-up reformation of the first word where the initial consonant is replaced by shm.Ĭomparative reduplication repeats an adjective to indicate an object’s change over time:Ĭomparative reduplication can avoid unintentional comparisons to another object, for instance: Shm- reduplication is a feature of American English with Yiddish roots. Rhyming reduplication refers to simple word pairs that rhyme:Įxact reduplication employs repeated words evocative of baby talk, which soften the tone of the subject: See-saw doesn’t use the letter i, but the high-vowel-before-low-vowel pattern still applies.Ĭool, right? If you think of any counter examples, let us know! Five Other Types of Reduplication 1. The i sound is considered a high vowel because of the location of the tongue relative to the mouth in American speech. In linguistic terms, you could say that a high vowel comes before a low vowel. In all these ablaut reduplication word pairs, the key vowels appear in a specific order: either i before a, or i before o. ![]() See if you can spot the unwritten rule in the following list of ablaut reduplication examples: ![]() Ablaut reduplication pairs words with internal vowel alternations. English has at least six types of reduplication. In linguistics, reduplication is the expressive repetition of a single word, or the pairing of a word with another of similar sound or spelling. You’ve definitely used it, but you’ve almost certainly never noticed. Like The Unwritten Adjective Rule, The Unwritten Ablaut Reduplication Rule is a maxim that we all seem to follow instinctively. Semi-related fun fact: In the early 2000s there are several tongue-in-cheek instances ( example) of the word “jargonaut” used to refer to someone who uses too much jargon, the latter half of which is of course a punny callback to the Argonauts (sailors on the Argo) of Greek mythology who quested for the Golden Fleece.English is rich with fun, eccentric conventions that go unnoticed. “Jabber” gave rise to “gibberish” around the 1550s as an adaptation of “jibber-jabber.” In the 17th century, “gibberish” was used pejoratively to refer to the language of gypsies and rogues.Īnd as you probably know, Lewis Carroll capitalized on the meaning of the word “jabber” in his nonsense-based epic-style poem “Jabberwocky,” which first appeared in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There(the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) in 1871. ![]() (Other Old English variations included javeren, jaberen, chaveren, and jawin.) Incidentally, the unintelligible sense of “jargon” also arose around the same time as the word “jabber,” which is from the Old English word jablen which meant more or less the same thing. “Jargon,” adopted from French in the 14th century, originally meant “unintelligible talk, gibberish chattering, jabbering.” It wryly took on its current meaning, “phraseology peculiar to a sect or profession,” in the 1650s due to the fact that such speech was unintelligible to outsiders. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |