Pyongpyang
As many of you know, Adam Albright and I enjoy collecting aggressive reduplications. (Short version: I’ve argued that if a word has partial internal similarity, there’s a drive to treat it as reduplicated. One consequence of such treatment is enhancement of that similarity, as in orangutan > orangutang.)
Bryan came across a fictional example the other day in Boondocks
that could be called “exuberant reduplication”:
Pyongyang (which in real life has 1,050,000 Google hits today) > …
- Pyongpyang (10 hits): onsets made to match
- Papoyongpayang (0 hits): ignoring initial reduplicated pa, we could view this as illegal onsets broken up, consonantal template made identical for poyong and payang. (By the way, there are 5 hits for poyongyang.)
- Pyangyang (101 hits): vowels made to match. (1,040 hits for Pyongyong, but I think some [a minority!] refer to a town whose name could reasonably be romanized that way.)
- Pyoungpongtang, Payangpatang-tang (0 hits each): now we’re just getting silly, but still in a reduplicative way.
Where do you draw the line between aggressive reduplication and exuberant reduplication?
Comment by Bob Kennedy — May 16, 2005 @ 9:26 am