a wolf angel is not a good angel

(See! I still think about language, even if I don’t research it as well as those fine folks at Language Log.)

My mother asked me recently why all the Hawaiian place names were so repetitive. Reduplication, I said. I don’t have a Hawaiian grammar, all I have is the often mistaken Lonely Planet guide (for instance, their guide to the Yucatan described Mayan as an “Amerind” language). The only example it has is wiki meaning fast, and wikiwiki meaning very fast. A very brief google search only gave that example, so I couldn’t tell if Hawaiian uses reduplication for anything else.

I gave some examples of reduplication. English, for instance, uses reduplication to use “real”. “Are you having decaf coffee or coffee coffee?” My family looked dubious. Now, there are some interesting restrictions on English reduplication, but the plain fact of it is incontestable (at least in every North American dialect I’ve ever come across).

Once I asked a friend about reduplication in Quebec French; it is used much like in English, but in a much more restricted set of places: specifically with sense-words. You can say this is “red-red” (as you can in English, though of course in French you’d use rouge), and mean that this is a true, fire-engine red, not some off red that’s bluer or oranger. But in QF, you cannot say that this is a salad-salad (as opposed to a chicken or tuna salad). I suspect that the contact with English will change this. I do not know what the rules are in Standard French.

You also can’t use larger phrases in French (unsurprisingly). In English, I can say “No, I’m seeing him seeing him” (I confirmed all these judgements with people, not linguists; they’re not just mine). This means something like you’re really in a relationship. (Note that “I slept with him slept with him” or “I slept-slept with him” are ambiguous: did you doze off or have sex? They’re not ambiguous for everyone, though.)

I didn’t really fight too hard with my parents & grandparents about this. They didn’t disbelieve me that the phenomenon exists, though they did disbelieve me that it was the same sort of thing as in Hawaiian, and I think they weren’t sure that it was as widespread as I made it seem. But later that same day, we were talking to someone on a beach, and she described it as a beach-beach. No one noticed.