Japanese has approximately a jillion expressions that are fully duplicative, i.e. the first part is repeated exactly in the second part. These seem to me, a foreigner, to also be frequently onomatopoeic, such as patta-patta, which refers to the flapping of wings on a flying bird. I don’t know if this sort of thing is of interest to the OP, and I can’t offhand think of any examples of rhyming reduplication in that language.
A lot of Chinese nicknames use a rhyming scheme–Hsing Hsing, Ling Ling, Pei Pei, Yo-Yo Ma, often (though not exclusively) for small children.
The Dada art movement’s name translates variously to “Yes yes” and “hobby horse.”
And pandas.
Interesting.In danish sniksnak means you’ve said something wrong or beside the point. “Snak” means talk (noun). Maybe we borrowed the german expression, but gradually changed it to what to danish ears sounded like a more straightforward meaning.
I remembered the phrase from when I lived in Mexico and read stories to my godson there, and I just googled the phrase to confirm its meaning. I was in a hurry, so I just copied the AI Google answer, rather than using my own words.
So, sorry, no help with your search terms. Q. Q. Switcheroo’s link looks helpful, though.
Another danish one: “hip som hap” meaning one or the other makes no difference. “som” means as/like, neither hip or hap has any meaning in danish.
For what it’s worth, the verb “schnacken” means “to talk” in North German dialect, also in the part of Germany bordering Denmark.
I used one in the wild this evening!!
As our choir was stumbling through a new song and we made it to the end intact, my wife, the pianist, said “Wow, we made it!”
And I said to her aos trancos e barrancos, a rhyming Portuguese expression meaning “in fits and starts”. I was so happy to have stumbled across this example since when I first saw this thread I couldn’t think of any.
I think there are very few aspects of English that are truly unique to English, out of all the thousands of languages out there. A linguist could confirm or deny.
Michael MacIntyre giving splendid examples of these on the Graham Norton show!
I can’t think of any, either. As you said, Japanese tends to have fully duplicative rather than rhyming duplicative.
Truly unique, maybe not — but there are some very rare ones, like the obligatory “a/an” vs. “the” merely to indicate if a noun is bring introduced or has already been part of the conversation.
Also, the English “r” sound is rare among languages — it’s just by chance that it is in the two most commonly spoken ones (the other is Mandarin Chinese).
Abra ka-dabra is simply ‘I create as I speak’ in Aramaic. Dopers who have studied Hebrew will immediately recognize the cognate roots.
Aramaic linguist Steve Caruso gives a detailed explanation here why “abracadabra” cannot be derived from Aramaic. Specifically, the final root supposedly meaning “speak” does not mean that in Aramaic:
First, the root דבר (dbr) pertains to direction or guidance in Aramaic, not speech — those being the verbs אמר (/amar/) or מלל (/malel/). Where this meaning is found in Hebrew, this was not a borrowing attested anywhere in 2nd Century Aramaic. In the whole of the Aramaic corpus, the word דבר is only found calqued in late Medieval Jewish Aramaic languages, far removed from Sammonicus’ time and place. On its face it appears to be a noun form and, depending on the specific Aramaic dialect, as a noun potential interpretations might include “leader,” “pasture,” or “plunder” — none of which fits the given description.
Additionally, if it were to function as a verb, it would necessitate a completely different inflection. Consequently, the purported Aramaic phrase is grammatically improbable and semantically convoluted.
He also traces the history of the false Aramaic etymology, which started in the late 19th century, and most remarkably, blames a 1999 posting on an Internet message board as being the earliest published reference to the Aramaic myth published on the Web. That message board is … The Straight Dope.
Hey, great! Spanish has a trancas y barrancas too, with exactly the same meaning 
I love closing loops! Do you happen to have the precise cite at hand? Was it perhaps Cecil himself?
Not really surprising in a language whose alphabet consists of only twelve letters plus a glottal stop, and every consonant must be followed by a vowel.
Colloquial Indonesian uses repetition, rather than rhyme. Does that count?
e.g “bebek” is one duck, “bebek bebek” is several ducks
There’s a link to the SDMB in Caruso’s article but it’s dead. After a little research I’m pretty sure that what happened was Cecil wrote this article on March 25, 1999 about the origin of “abracadabra,” “hocus-pocus,” and “presto”. He listed three possible origins of “abracadabra”, none of them Aramaic.
Then in this SDMB thread soon after, a user (apparently the user attributions are lost in this very old thread; all posts are attributed to “system”, but the post is signed “Chaim Mattis Keller”) said that they had heard a different origin, from “abra ke-dabra” in Hebrew meaning “I will create as I speak”. Then another user (post signed “Akiva Miller”) broadly agreed with that derivation but said it was from Aramaic, not Hebrew. This is probably what Caruso claims is the first appearance of the Aramaic story on the Web.
A user (again Miller, I think) then claimed that the Aramaic derivation comes from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, but Caruso says that the attribution is mistaken and that Kushner “wrote no such thing”, which is odd because Miller gave the exact book and page number where Kushner supposedly wrote this (The Book of Words, p.11). Frustratingly, neither Amazon nor Google Books seems to have an image of the page in question.
You have closed the loop very neatly, thank you. Nice.
Not perfect rhyme, but めちゃくちゃ mecha kucha is the best I can think of right now.
Irish has a lovely phrase rí rá agus ruaille buaille which means a commotion.