WORDSPEAK
Echoes in language
BY ANAND
Such echo words, where the second word is nonsensical and is invented on the fly, are naturally not found in a dictionary.
IN the previous "Wordspeak" that was in memory of Shaunul Haq Haqqee, the renowned Urdu linguist and lexicographer, I mentioned one of my conversations with him about echo words in various languages.
At the root of these words is Echo, a mountain nymph of Greek mythology who chattered incessantly so that Hera would not hear other nymphs tattle that her husband Zeus was embarked on one of his amorous adventures, and was consequently condemned by Hera to always repeat another person's last words. In linguistic terminology, an echo utterance is a type of conversational sentence, which repeats, in whole or in part, what has just been said by another speaker. For example, A: Sit down here. B: Sit down there? An echoic word is one formed to imitate the actual sound of something, not unlike onomatopoeia, if we must split hairs. And in clinical usage, echolalia means automatic repetition of all or part of what someone has said.
Linguistic oddity
But Shanul Haq Saheb and I were talking about none of these. My curiosity had been aroused by the increasing occurrence of a linguistic oddity in North American English, borrowed from Yiddish, where the initial sound (consonant) of a word duplicated for added effect is switched to "schm". And that such colloquial usage confined so far to dialogue (the spoken) was creeping into the written, as the following examples testify:
"Fancy-Schmancy formatting HI: Bullets" (from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows XP by Paul McFedries).
"Early in high school, I was placed in honors English, where I understood all the fancy-schmancy poets and I to explain them to the teacher and was able to ..." (from Biography & Autobiography by Ashanti, the pop singer).
Yiddish has a variety of words beginning with "schm": schmuck = stupid, schmooze = intimate networking, schmaltz = overly sentimental, and the semantic borrowing of such duplication in Yiddish by North American English is often used in the sense of "and the like", "etcetera" or even to belittle the importance of someone or something: "No party-schmarty for me." And "Bush-Schmush, said the Iranian." Such echo words, where the second word is nonsensical and is invented on the fly, are naturally not found in a dictionary. These are different from regular echo words where both elements have "meaning" and may be derived from separate words or morphemes that have different meanings: wishy-washy, fender-bender, dilly-dally, nitwit, SoHo (the last is a part of New York City located South of Houston Street, in the Village).
An Urdu term
My grumble that there was no name for this particular linguistic phenomenon was cut short by Shanul Haq Saheb uttering "taabe mulmul" which, he explained, was the Urdu term for echo or hybrid words where the second member of the word was nonsensical and began, in almost all case, with a consonant.
"Almost in all cases" above is worth noting, as we shall see. Speakers of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi often do "taabe mulmul" as in "Let's have some chai-vai," and even when speaking in English "Let's have some tea-vee." Hindi and Urdu speakers favour beginning the echo word with a `v,' but Punjabi speakers habitually switch the sound to `sh' as in "Let's have some chai-shai." The Punjabi preference is carried over to spoken English. What is remarkable is that, regardless of the language, the sense in which they do the "taabe mulmul" is exactly the same as in Yiddish-influenced North American English.
What made this investigation into echo words fascinating was the discovery that similar usage is found in languages such as Vietnamese, Khmer, Bahasa Indonesian and Persian. I heard Persian-speakers begin the second (copied) member of the two with the consonant `m.' And the tendency among a branch of Urdu speakers from U.P. and Bihar is even more intriguing; they put the copy word before the `meaningful' word, almost always beginning it with a vowel: "aaltoo-faaltoo" (the latter meaning "rubbish"), and "umputer-computer."
The sound of `g' seems to be favoured by Telugu speakers for copied words in the following examples: "illu-gillu" (houses and the like), and "nasugu-gosugu" (nasugu = hesitation).
Since I cannot lay claim to any store of scholarly learning, and because I am painfully conscious of the lack of depth in my knowledge of Indian languages, I am writing this column with some trepidation and, of course, hope that the readers will not only set me right, but also — should they happen to meet a speaker of, let's say, Swahili from Africa or Lappish and Yakuts from the Arctic — they would inquire if the others too do "taabe mulmul' in that language.
E-mail: anand@journalist.com
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