1776: Bilingual Tautological Expressions Oct 25, 2019

Although English is known to be amalgamated from different languages' lexicons, other languages take this to a redundant extreme. For instance, many languages have pleonasm—basically redundancy—like 'tuna fish' in English or 'Yo te amo' in Spanish, where the '-o' indicates the first person without the need for a pronoun 'Yo'. Some languages, and in particular Yiddish, have this feature bilingually. These are sometimes called bilingual tautological expressions, and in this case it usually relies on having a Yiddish and Hebrew word or phrase back-to-back. For instance, the phrase 'חמור-אייזל' (khamer-eyzl) is used to denote a womanizer, but literally means 'donkey-donkey' in Hebrew and then in Yiddish respectively.

Expect more on this tomorrow.

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