Super Duper

My last column was about word doubling in Indonesian, but it is such a rich topic that I thought a double column about doubling was in order.

It's just that once you start looking for doubling in Indonesian, or tune your ear to it, you find it absolutely everywhere, and it functions in so many fascinating ways. We already talked about onomatopoeiasound words where the vowel changes, like we have in English (clip-clop, pitter-patter and so forth), and which Indonesian has in spades. We have also talked about doubling nouns as one way of making them plural. Then there are other doublings we discussed last time which create all kinds of nuances of meaning including: making actions reciprocal, or repeated; a sense of something being constant and ongoing; giving actions a sense of play or aimlessness; making things deliberately less specific, or sometimes precisely the opposite, making them more so.

December 22, 2015