This video was made possible by CuriosityStream. Get the Nebula-CuriosityStream bundle for
the sale price of less than $15 a year by going to curiositystream.com/HAI. How do you do, fellow kids? Are you into hop-hip? No? What about tok-tik? Or perhaps I could interest you in a game
of pong-ping? I’ll just need to be careful because I’m
wearing flop-flips. Why are you laughing with me? What’s that? Oh, you’re laughing at me. I see. Well, how about I prove just how cool and
lit I am by spending the next five minutes explaining the obscure grammatical phenomenon
behind why everything I said before made me sound like Joe Biden trying to get out the
youth vote. It’s called ablaut reduplication, and to
understand it, we have to do like a hop-hipper and break it down. So, ablaut is just any pattern of vowel shifts
inside of related words. Like sing-sang-sung: the S, N, and G stay
the same, but the vowel changes. Ablaut is used for a lot of different things;
sometimes, like with sing-sang-sung, it’s to shift verb tenses: sing is present tense,
sang is simple past tense, and sung is past participle—and I know you’ve forgotten
what a past participle is, but given the limited time we’ve cut our explanation. There are lots of English verbs that do this:
give and gave, ride and rode, drink-drank-drunk, and stink-stank-stunk. Ablaut is also sometimes used to distinguish
singular and plural nouns: that’s why, for example, you can fight off one goose, but
you’ll be beaten up by multiple geese. You can try to kick the geese with one foot,
but soon they’ll manage to tie up both your feet. And whether you’re a man or a woman, you’ll
be most humiliated when you have to yell at several nearby men and women to save you. Now let’s talk about reduplication, which
is country-club-elitist-vaccine-talk for when you repeat a word, or part of it, for some
effect. Like a leprechaun’s tax filings, reduplication
comes in many forms. The simplest is exact reduplication, which
is when you just repeat a word exactly. It’s why you might tell a child it’s a
no-no to cry wah-wah before night-night—or why your drunken friend might go wee-wee on
a putt-putt course, and have to say bye-bye once he’s arrested by the po-po. Some languages will use exact reduplication
to create plurals: in Malay, rumah is a house, and rumah-rumah is houses; it’s a convention
that, like many patents, has been copied by Chinese: for example, in Mandarin, ren is
person, and renren is people. In English, there are a number of other reduplication
variants. One is rhyming reduplication: it’s why you
might use a teenie-weenie, itsy-bitsy walkie-talkie to gather a super-duper rag-tag team, and
then you could all do the hokey-pokey. Quite possibly the most fun variation is called
“shm reduplication,” which is when you repeat a word, but replace the beginning with
“shm.” For nouns, shm reduplication makes you sound
dismissive of that thing: “You’re tired? Tired-shmired, get over it.” “You got beaten up by a violent gang of
geese? Geese-shmeese, walk it off.” For adjectives, though, shm doesn’t dismiss
the meaning, but intensifies it; that’s why you can go to a fancy-schmancy restaurant—or
at least, you can if your attitude on public health is “covid-shmovid.” Shm reduplication originates from Yiddish-speaking
areas of New York, and has since become widely adopted across the country by anyone who wants
to make something sound dumb, and it’s especially interesting because it is productive, which
means you can apply it to whatever word you want. YouTube, ShmouTube. Wendover, Shmendover. Smosh, Shmosh—actually that one doesn’t
really work well, but you get the idea. Another reduplication variation is contrastive
focus reduplication, where you emphasize the first repetition to imply you want the true
form of something. I don’t want oat milk, I want milk milk. Or as many viewers are likely commenting,
I don’t want grammar jokes, I want joke jokes. So, now you know what ablaut is, and what
reduplication is, which means it’s time for the incredible Avengers-style team-up
you knew was coming all along: ablaut reduplication. Ablaut reduplication is when you repeat a
word, but with a vowel shift… and we use it all the time. Chit-chat, flip-flop, flim-flam, hip-hop,
riff-raff, knick-knack, ticky-tacky, wishy-washy, pish-posh, criss-cross; and there are tons
more, but what’s really fascinating about ablaut reduplication is that it’s a rule
that native English speakers intuitively know, but have probably never thought about: anytime
you use ablaut reduplication, the vowel shift must follow this precise order: I then A,
then O. Nearly every instance of ablaut reduplication
starts with “i” as the first vowel, followed by a shift to either “a” or “o”—in
the case of rare three-parters, like tic-tac-toe or splish-splash-splosh, the A always goes
before the O. This vowel shift pattern is called a front-to-back
pattern, because the first vowel sound, the sound you get from the “i” in words like
flip or hip, ĭ, is formed at the front of the mouth, and the next vowel sounds—which
for “o” are either ŏ like flop or ô like song and for “a” are either ă like
flap or ä like washy—those vowel sounds are formed at the back of your mouth. Say “pish-posh” out loud right now, and
notice how the ĭ in pish is at the front of your mouth, and the ŏ in posh is at the
back. Then notice how everyone in the library is
staring at you. Now, there are a few examples of ablaut reduplication
that start with not with “i” but with “e”—hee-haw, see-saw, and teeter-totter—but
even then, that long “e” is a front vowel, so the front-to back pattern is still followed. Bottom line is, if you don’t follow a precise
front-to-back vowel pattern—you try to say hop-hip or cross-criss or tac-toe-tic—you’ll
sound like your brain is a bit wibbly-wobbly. And I know that you’re wondering: why? Why do we do this extremely specific, weirdly
technical vowel shift to describe everything from dumb shoes to dumb games to dumb racist
allegories? Well, we genuinely have no idea. Seriously. Not a clue. All the theories are about as useful as everyone’s
guesses about what Evan Peters was doing on Wandavision, which means that in the end,
ablaut reduplication’s origins will always remain wishy-washy and topsy-turvy. You may think ablaut reduplication is a bunch
of pish-posh, but you know what’s tip top? The Nebula-CuriosityStream bundle. If you like HAI or Wendover, you’ll definitely
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What’s fascinating to me—and Chomsky Doe—is how kids so fluidly pick up on the rule structures of language. They don’t know from verbs, but they can still conjugate them. It’s amazing to me, every time.