Since reading Kie Zuraw’s work on aggressive reduplication (changes where “already-similar syllables are made more similar”, with no apparent phonotactic rationale), I’ve noticed several other possible cases of this in English. As I will probably never use this list for anything else, I offer it here as data for anyone interested in this topic.
As in Zuraw’s paper, rough popularity is indicated by number of Google hits.
| Non-standard form | ghits | Standard form | ghits |
| Barbar the elephant | 1,230 | Babar the elephant | 21,900 |
| Yuri Gargarin | 3,780 | Yuri Gagarin | 312,000 |
| Klu Klux Klan | 132,000 | Ku Klux Klan | 1,700,00 |
| buproprion | 95,500 | bupropion | 4,020,000 |
| snuffalufagus | 23,000 | snuffalupagus | 7,800 |
| snuffleufagus | 1,250 | snuffleupagus | 115,000 |
| onaconna | 850 | ||
| marscarpone | 45,400 | mascarpone | 2,290,000 |
(“Onaconna” is a deliberate misspelling of “on account of”.)
As evidence of how these pronunciations arise, I can attest that my daughter (3;8) spontaneously starting saying “Barbar” although I was careful to use the correct pronunciation in her first exposure to the Babar books.
Another possibly related case is the Biblical pair Priscilla and Aquilla: Kenyon & Knott 1953 note that Aquilla is often incorrectly given second syllable stress, apparently to make it rhyme with Priscilla. But since this involves making two words rhyme, perhaps it better falls under the rubric of “paradigmatically echoic words” than aggressive reduplication.
Ref:
Kenyon, J.S. & T. A. Knott (1953) “A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English”. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster.
1, #2, and #3 might be contributed to by arhotic dialects’ difficulty in distinguishing /ar/ from /a:/.
<p>That’s certainly possible. It would be interesting to see whether aggressive reduplication plays any role in the spellings that non-rhotic speakers choose when trying to guess whether a vowel is orthographically followed by r.</p>
<p>I was lazy and didn’t transcribe the words, but I should mention that in the case of “mascarpone”, the correct form is usually heard with [æ] in the first syllable, while the reduplicated form has an [a]. So the vowel is changing, in addition to the insertion of a coda [r].</p>
Thanks for sharing these, Nancy! There are also a few hits for snup(p)alup(p)agus, snup(p)leup(p)agus, etc., and about two for the non-reduplicative snup(p)aluf(f)agus, _snup(p)pleufagus. Not surprising, I guess, that it’s the second /p/ that’s more vulnerable.
But the main reason I wanted to post a comment was that when I read this, I had just been talking with my knitting group about your /r/-dissimilation research. It came up because someone in the group knows someone (native speaker of English) who says ‘appropiate’ a lot.
Just in case anybody’s looking back at old posts, here’s one that annoys me (taking off my linguist’s hat for a moment)
accrediDation (i.e. [əkrɛdɪdeɪʃən] in place of [əkrɛdɪtʰeɪʃən] )
if you deal with administrativese at universities you’ll hear this all the time.