Rhyming reduplication is phrases like artsy fartsy, boogie woogie, easy peasy, hanky panky, hoity toity, hurley burley, or okey dokey.
Is this unique to English? Or do other languages do this? Is it widespread in most languages?
It is not clear what, or purportedly what, this linguistic process specifically has to do with English? I mean, it is demonstrably false that, generally speaking, this is “unique to English”: German has words like Kuddelmuddel, Russian has plaksa-vaksa, Turkish has dergi-mergi, etc. Although, there might be differences among languages on the morphosemantic level, different types of reduplication subprocesses, and so on.
German: schnickschnack = means something trivial or useless (I think…?)
Mandarin: mamahuhu = muddled and unclear
Rather the latter. It’s used to refer to unnecessarily fancy or expensive items.
Korean has 들쑥날쑥 (deulssung-nalssung) meaning rough, uneven, or jagged. The usual thing in that language, though, is complete reduplication–repeating the entire sound–or alliterative reduplication–repeating the beginning sounds.
So somewhat akin to “frou-frou” in English.
Polynesian languages have many words that repeat or rhyme in that way. So do Aboriginal languages. I think it’s done for emphasis, to represent “more” of something, like an especially large river or wide desert.
Hebrew has tohu v’bohu (“without form and void”), as seen in Genesis 1:2.
Here’s a global map. The OP’s criterion would be a subset of the “partial reduplication” examples on the map.
From the explanation text:
A complex construction involves reduplication with some different phonological material, such as a vowel or consonant change or addition, or morpheme order reversal. Mangarrayi (Northern Territory, Australia) has a reduplicative construction to denote plurality in which the consonant of the second syllable and the vowel of the first syllable are copied to form a new second syllable in the derived word. The newly created syllable does not correspond to any constituent in the original word: walima ‘young person’ > walalima ‘young people’; yirag ‘father’ > yirirag-ji ‘father and children’ (Merlan 1982). In Tuvan (Turkic; Russia), diminutive ‘s’ reduplication copies the entire base except the initial consonant, which is replaced by [s] in the reduplicant, e.g. pelek ‘gift’ > pelek-selek ‘gift.diminutive’. For bases that are vowel-initial, an onset [s] is added to the reduplicant, e.g. aar ‘heavy’ > aar-saar ‘heavy.diminutive’; uuruk-suuruk ‘simultaneously’ (Harrison 2000). Patterns such as these exist in a number of languages and are collectively referred to as “echo constructions.”
So, “echo constructions” is one term for what the OP is curious about.
Not much of a linguist but I think in Yiddish you say <word> schm<word>.
Adopted into German as Tohuwabohu, which generally means chaos. Another, genuine German example is ruckzuck, which means quick or in an instant.
ETA: got another one, Heckmeck, which also means chaos or mess.
And German has Tohuwabohu, which means great mess, utter confusion, jumble, chaos.
Ninja’d by EinsteinsHund, of course. Again. That is what happens to me for searching cites and linking to them. Ah, well…
When something is repeated for emphasis you can say in German it is doppeltgemoppelt, which is also an example of this phonetic repetition. It happens a lot in German, I guess in Spanish too, but I can’t think of an example right now. Strange. Will come again later.
That’s a good, meta example!
ETA: there’s even a common saying including the word: “Doppeltgemoppelt hält besser.” Not easy to translate, but something like “Done twice will keep longer”. It’s what you’d say when you’re assembling something, maybe some wood construction, and screw in an extra screw for safety where maybe one screw would’ve been sufficient.
And concerning your example Heckmeck, it is one of the bars in my neighborhood:
https://www.kiezkneipe.schultheiss.de/kiezkneipen/heckmeck/
Cool, that’s a great name for a bar! I was wondering if Heckmeck was Westphalian dialect, but Berliners seem to also know and use the word.
And what about holperdipolter for the bumpy ride back from the chaotic bar?
And still can’t think of a Spanish example.
I opened the link to Duden, and one synonym for Tohuwabohu it gives is another example of what we’re talking about: Wirrwarr.
ETA: IIRC, tohu v’bohu in the Torah (Genesis 1 in Christian nomenclature) is the expression for the state before Yahweh created the world. When Martin Luther did his famous translation of the Hebrew Bible, he didn’t find a good German word for it, so he just adapted the original Hebrew and made up the word Tohuwabohu, and this was how it joined the German language. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of this anecdote, but it’s true that Luther’s Bible translation introduced hundreds of new words and expressions to the German language.
IIRC there is a Russian thing – a very long saying or a very short story – that means a man was crossing a bridge and saw a crayfish down in the water, so he reached down to grab the crayfish, but instead the crayfish grabbed him and pulled him into the water. In Russian almost every syllable has an “ee” vowel sound, so it almost makes an extremely long example of this.
Anybody know this one? Did I get it even sort of right?
Sounds like it’s the Russian equivalent of Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.
The only Spanish example that has come to my mind so far is finishing a sentence that would trail off in English with “…and this and that and so on” with …y patatín y patatán. I admit it is a weak example, and feel quite stumped by this block in my recollection. There must be more!