Hello, folks.
I think I’ve mentioned today’s topic before, but I really lost myself in it this time! What have I mentioned? That it is interesting how so many languages have a rhyming response that basically means “so-so.” For example, “How are you feeling today, Abdul?” “I was really sick yesterday, but today I’m feeling so-so.” (He’s not feeling great, but he’s not as sick as he was. According to M-W, it means “neither very good nor very bad.”)
I made a table of the items that I found with Google™ translate. I’m sorry if they didn’t get them translated correctly—the one’s I’m familiar with are good. You be the judge if you speak any of the other languages. I picked the languages randomly, but as you’ll see, so many of them are the same word repeated, or something that rhymes. I did not include the multitude of different texts (Greek, Arabic, Japanese), just how they’d are pronounced.
| Language | Term used to mean “so so” |
| Arabic | nisf nisf |
| Catalan | tan així |
| Chinese | mǎma hūhu |
| Czech | tak-tak |
| English | so-so
frobly-mobly |
| Finnish | niin niin |
| French | comme ci comme ça |
| German | soso |
| Greek | etsi k’etsi |
| Hawaiian | ʻano |
| Hebrew | kech-kech |
| Igbo | so-so |
| Irish | mar sin-sin |
| Italian | cosi cosi |
| Japanese | mā mā |
| Kikongo | yo yina-yo yina |
| Latin | sic-so |
| Malay | jadi-jadi |
| Maori | na-na |
| Mongolian | tiim tiim |
| Romanian | asa-asa |
| Samoan | e a la e a la |
| Spanish | mas o menos
asi asi |
| Swedish | så som så |
| Turkish | şöyle böyle |
| Welsh | felly-felly |
| Yiddish | azoy-azoy |
I figured there must be some very smart people out there who could tell me more about this phenomenon. I wasn’t sure what to look for, but I did find this on Wikipedia. I’m cutting and pasting a little because it gets sort of heavy.
In linguistics, reduplication is a…process in which the root or stem of a word…or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
Bingo! I was so happy! Here’s a little more:
Examples can be found in language as old as Sumerian, where it was used in forming some color terms, e.g., babbar "white", kukku "black".
Reduplication is the standard term for this phenomenon in the linguistics literature. Other occasional terms include cloning, doubling, duplication, repetition, and tautonym (when it is used in biological taxonomies, such as Bison bison).
Another article I read wasn’t specifically about the term so-so, but about how (in English) we like to create these reduplicative terms, particularly to make things sound silly. Here’s something someone sent me for another topic. I think maybe from Merriam-Webster:
- willy-nilly
- easy-peasy
- jiggery-pokery
- flim-flam
- skimble-skamble
- ricky-tick
- hurly-burly
- super-duper
I never took a linguistic class, but I always love when I discover this type of thing!
Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Technical Publications
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