zwoelffarben:

lemonsharks:

elalmadelmar:

brunhiddensmusings:

championoftheravenqueen:

headspace-hotel:

mrcloudyfun:

absolxguardian:

hownottolearnalanguage:

I’m kind of glad to hear that everyone does this. Because it means it isn’t colonizer bullshit, it’s what everyone does. It’s just people discovering new things. Everyone goes:

“Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A’s word for thing. Say, what do you call it?”

“Oh it’s [language B’s word for thing].”

“Got it, it’s [language B’s word for thing] variety [language A’s word for thing]”

The human race just naturally moon moons itself

Bread Bread

“the-tea-from-where-tea-is-called-by-this-name”

“the-bread-from-where-bread-is-called-by-this-name”

how is that not a useful term?

This is seriously not colonizer bullshit, it’s just one of the common ways that loan words work.

linguistics side of tumblr please talk about how this is a type of reduplication

Andso, a finger on the monkey’s paw curled.

This isn’t a type of reduplication. Reduplication is a very specific linguistic phenomenon which refers to the duplication of phonemes, morphemes, words, or whole ass clauses, as a way to changing meaning, add or remove emphasis, or a whole bunch of other things. But it’s specifically about the repeatition of sound: ‘bread’ is reduplicated to ‘bread bread’ or ‘brebread’ or ‘breadad’ or what have you depending on your reduplication scheme; and not ‘naan bread.’

Naan Bread and such are an example of an entirely different linguistic phenomenon centering reduncency, except it isn’t the sound that’s redundent but the meaning assigned to the sound. It’s the broadest terms, naan bread is a tautology(linguistics); narrowing in on specifics, it’s Semantic Pleonasm, in which two words which convey similar information are paired together to give the best combination of information; Think “tuna fish” for a monolingual example of variety-category semantic Pleonasm. Then getting to specifics, we have Bilingual Tautological/‘Pleonastic’ Expressions, in which the combination of words are sourced from two differet languages. This is where we find ‘Naan Bread’ and everything else this post is talking about.

Lastly, related to this post but having nothing to do with bread are an incomplete lists of places whose name are Bilingual Pleonastic Expressions, and RAS Syndrome which is another type of Pleonasm that people tend to tie their boxers into knots over.