976: Derivation (Reduplication part 2/3) Aug 11, 2017

This is the second post on reduplication, but if you missed the one yesterday, click the link. Reduplication is not only used for emphasis as discussed before, but also it is used to indicate grammatical changes, in other languages. Many languages, such as those in the Malayo-Polonesian family, use reduplication as a way to pluralize words, so, for example the Indonesian 'orang', from which English gets 'orangutan' means 'person', but the plural 'people' would be 'orang-orang'. Plenty of other languages allow for this as well, including Dakota in which adjectives also can be reduplicated depending on if they modify a singular or plural noun, but reduplication can also occur with verbs in order to indicate different forms, ranging from tense to number and more. While this is not possible in Modern English, some verbs in Indo-European languages changed tense by reduplicating segments of a word (though not the whole word), so Gothic's present tense 'háitan' ('to name') becomes 'haíháit' in the past-tense ('I named'). Additionally, some languages use reduplication of verbs to show increased force or attention.
Stay tuned for even more tomorrow on reduplication.