Re: OT: Reduplication enquiry

Japanese has some interesting reduplication patterns
to indicate a limited set of nouns in the plural.

The only example I can think of off-hand is
'hitobito', 'people', for 'hito', 'person'. Note the
shift of [h] to [b]. The Japanese use of reduplication
is extremely limited, as far as I can tell, and used
only with nouns to indicate a plural when a plural is
absolutely necessary, but nevertheless, it's
fascinating.

Any Japanese speakers willing to back me up?

I also had reduplication for nouns in my conlang, cci
an tain [cCi.n=.d&in], where the first syllable of the
word would be prefixed and the stem would 'weaken'.
The reduplication created a variant on the word, like
the German prefix 'ge-' on nouns.

Anyways, the examples:

marat [ma.'rQt] 'sailors'
mauearat [ma.'va.rQt] 'crew'

nta [n=.da] 'child'
nanta [nan.da] 'descendants'

ari [?a.re] 'mountain peak'
accari [ak.ka.re] 'mountain range'

Generally, like Japanese, the nouns that reduplicate
are a relatively closed class.

But I don't suppose you can do a paper on a conlang,
can you?

--- Pavel Iosad <edricson@...> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm in the process of choosing what to do as my year
> paper, and a nice
> topic has cropped up, offered by my tutor with whom
> I did the Tundra
> Nenets fieldwork. He suggests I treat on formal
> (phonological,
> morphological rather than semantic) aspects of
> reduplication in any
> language (in an Optimality Theory or similar
> framework), so I need a
> relatively well-described language with some nice
> reduplicaions (not of
> the Indonesian type, I mean, rather of the Latin,
> but hopefully more
> complex). Does anyone know what languages have nice,
> devilishly complex
> :-) reduplications, and preferably have them nicely
> described? Also
> remember I'm in Russia, so if a book is newer than
> 1996 or thereabouts,
> it's in all probability not in our libraries... :-(
>
> Thank you, folks.
>
> Pavel
> --
> Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru
>
> Nid byd, byd heb wybodaeth
>                  --Welsh saying

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

Reply