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I was looking up "seesaw" on Wiktionary , and I noticed all their examples of ablaut reduplication "such as teeter-totter, zigzag, flip-flop, ping pong, etc." have "ee" or "i" in the first word, replaced by "o" or "a" in the second word:

  • seesaw
  • teeter-totter
  • zigzag
  • flip-flop
  • ping pong
  • sing-song
  • kitty-cat

Is there a process by which this kind of reduplication that involves only a vowel change ensures that the first vowel is front/close and the second vowel is back/open?

Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_
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CJ Dennis
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  • Those examples are all ablaut reduplication. There are also rhyming and exact forms, among others. With the exception of schm, reduplication is generally fixed in form, and non-productive. – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jan 28 '19 at 13:59
  • I suspect that it is a more or less universal preference of human beings rather than something unique to English. I was told that ping pong derived from the Chinese píngpàngchù rather than the other way around. – BoldBen Jan 28 '19 at 14:04
  • @BoldBen Yeah..probably is a preference...I had a paper around someplace that described the opposite form as kind of grating on the ear to the point that it caused negative emotional reaction to the listener. – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jan 28 '19 at 14:07
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    Related: crisscross, dillydally, riffraff, etc. – tchrist Jan 28 '19 at 15:22
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    Yes. High vowels come before low in reduplicated freezes, and front before back, generally speaking. These are two of the principles from Cooper and Ross, which should probably be absorbed before drawing any conclusions. – John Lawler Jan 28 '19 at 16:40
  • Your question “Is there a process by which reduplication that involves only a vowel change ensures that the first vowel is front/close and the second vowel is back/open?”should be clarified. Do mean only in ablaut reduplication, or all type? – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jan 28 '19 at 19:06
  • @JohnLawler Is "freeze" a nonstandard term for a fixed phrase? – CJ Dennis Jan 28 '19 at 22:04
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    @Cascabel I think by adding the word "ablaut" you've made the question self-answering. – CJ Dennis Jan 28 '19 at 22:08
  • @Cascabel I am an enthusiastic amateur. I have enough background to understand most answers, but not enough background to write a decent answer myself in more technical cases like this one. – CJ Dennis Jan 28 '19 at 22:18
  • @BoldBen Nope – the actual Chinese form is 乒乓(球) pīngpāng(qiú), and it’s the Chinese that’s a loan-translation of the English, not the other way around. Both English ping-pong and Chinese pīngpāng were used for centuries before the game came along, but in different senses: in English, it had the ‘back and forth’ sense, whereas in Chinese it was more like ‘bada-boom’, referring to loud crashes and such things. It didn’t take on the back-and-forth sense in Chinese until they used it to represent/translate the phonetically similar English word. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 28 '19 at 23:04
  • @CJDennis: Freeze is the term that Cooper and Ross use to describe such fixed phrases as criss-cross/*cross-criss which consist of two lexical items that have to be in a certain order. Not every fixed phrase is a freeze, in their terms; but all the ones in the examples given are. – John Lawler Jan 28 '19 at 23:52
  • @JohnLawler I'm surprised that you say fixed phrases can be variable. I would have thought that the two are mutually exclusive. Not all idioms are "frozen", but I would have thought that all fixed phrases were "frozen". – CJ Dennis Jan 28 '19 at 23:56
  • It depends on what you mean by "fixed phrase"; there are a number of definitions, often including constructions that have fixed parts and variable parts, like let alone. – John Lawler Jan 29 '19 at 00:05

1 Answers1

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Since some time has passed without an answer, I thought I'd try with a partial one.

I don't know of any examples of ablaut reduplications in English where the first vowel is the backer/opener one.

You asked about a "process", but I think it's difficult to analyze because reduplication is not extremely productive in English. The words that show this pattern of vowel change have somewhat miscellaneous origins, which makes it difficult to describe them in terms of derivation from some single process.

  • Some OED entries suggest that in at least some cases, the back vowel is original and the front vowel created during the derivation: the entry for (k)nick-(k)nack says "Reduplication of knack n.2, with first element lightened as in crick-crack, etc."

  • In some cases, however, each part of the reduplication consists of a preexisting word-form: this seems to be the case with sing-song and kitty-cat.

There are alternative types of reduplication; as mentioned in the comments, there is rhyming reduplication with consonant alternation. "Schm-" reduplication is, unusually, somewhat productive; there are also fairly non-productive but notable patterns like h-C reduplication and C-w reduplication (I wrote an answer going into more detail about these here: Why is a rhyming word beginning with “h” put before another word to create a new term?)

herisson
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