You know those two-word things like: splish splash, tick tock, bing bang, chit chat, dilly dally, ding dong, riff raff, and so on. I don't know what they're called, but I saw something on a news program discussing them and it said the first word in the pair almost always contains an "i". It has something to do with the "i" is easier to say (as to position of mouth and tongue) than other vowels so it comes first.
I thought that was interesting.
It always amuses me, how the English language goes out of its way to make things complicated. For instance, you can just imagine some male (it will always be male) English professors sitting around a table, and one goes;
"We need to come up with a name for when we snappily alter vowels used in repetition." And rather than come up with a snappy title to match, they go full bore anal and decided on a term that sounds pretty much like what you would say into a porcelain throne after necking fifteen pints, eight shots and several packets of laxative, because, well, it sounded like a good idea at the time...
And, because the English are twats, they make a rule on how it should be used. For two words it's I then either A or O. For three words, it's I,A,O. And immediately (because they are twats) they break that rule with something like 'Shit, shower, shave'....
This isn't an English thing, it's an academic thing. Or more generally, an in-group thing. Jobs, cultural groups, minorities, regions, guilds, academic fields, fan clubs -- all have their own words.
All groups use specialized terminology to distinguish themselves from non-members. These terms do in fact have a purpose, although that purpose may not make sense to non-members.
With reference to ablaut reduplications, the English term is actually adapted from the French term: Redoublement linguistique and is a specialised form of a more general phenomenon called syllabic reduplication. The interesting thing about these reduplications is that they are very common across Romance languages, but they are not a feature of Latin.
how the English language goes out of its way to make things complicated
Not just the English language. This rule also applies in Indo-European languages.
Ablaut Reduplications.
I figured someone here would know. :)
On the news program, they only talked about the "i" coming first. But when I googled that name, it said: "the vowels almost always follow the order I-A-O." And that applies to "tic tac toe."
See my previous reply to Sarkasmus, written at the same time you were obviously writing yours... LOL
A detailed and amusing explanation was given on QI, a BBC quiz programme hosted by Sandi Toksvig
