§ 6.6.3 Rhyme combinations

Rhyme combinations are twin forms consisting of two elements (most often two pseudo-morphemes) which are joined to rhyme: boogie-woogie, flibberty-gibberty ‘frivolous’, harum-scarum ‘disorganised’, helter-skelter ‘in disordered haste’, hoity-toity ‘snobbish’, humdrum ‘bore’, hurry-scurry ‘great hurry’, hurdy-gurdy ‘a small organ’, lovey-dovey ‘darling’, mumbo-jumbo ‘deliberate mystification, fetish’,

¹ O. Jespersen, H. Koziol and the author of this book in a previous work.

130

namby-pamby ‘weakly sentimental’, titbit ‘a choice morsel’, willy-nilly ‘compulsorily’ (cf. Lat volens-nolens).

The choice of the basic sound cluster in some way or other is often not arbitrary but motivated, for instance, lovey-dovey is motivated in both parts, as well as willy-nilly. Hurry-scurry and a few other combinations are motivated in the first part, while the second is probably a blend if we take into consideration that in helter-skelter the second element is from obsolete skelt ‘hasten’.

About 40% of these rhyme combinations (a much higher percentage than with the ablaut combinations) are not motivated: namby-pamby, razzle-dazzle. A few are borrowed: pow-wow ‘a noisy assembly’ (an Algonquin¹ word), mumbo-jumbo (from West African), but the type is purely English, and mostly modern.

The pattern is emotionally charged and chiefly colloquial, jocular, often sentimental in a babyish sort of way. The expressive character is mainly due to the effect of rhythm, rhyme and sound suggestiveness. It is intensified by endearing suffixes -y, -sie and the jocular -ty, -dy. Semantically predominant in this group are words denoting disorder, trickery, teasing names for persons, and lastly some playful nursery words. Baby-talk words are highly connotative because of their background.

§ 6.7 Pseudo-compounds

The words like gillyflower or sparrow-grass are not actually compounds at all, they are cases of false-etymology, an attempt to find motivation for a borrowed word: gillyflower from OFr giroflé, crayfish (small lobster-like fresh-water crustacean, a spiny lobster) from OFr crevice, and sparrow-grass from Latin asparagus.

May-day (sometimes capitalised May Day) is an international radio signal used as a call for help from a ship or plane, and it has nothing to do with the name of the month, but is a distortion of the French m'aidez ‘help me’ and so is not a compound at all.

§ 6.8 The historical development of english compounds

Compounding, one of the oldest methods of word-formation occurring in all Indo-European languages, is especially developed in Germanic languages. English has made use of compounding in all periods of its existence. Headache, heartache, rainbow, raindrop and many other compounds of the type noun stem+noun stem and its variant, such as manslaughter <OE mannslæht with the deverbal noun stem for a second element, go back to Old English. To the oldest layer belong also the adjective stem+noun stem compounds: holiday, sweetmeat, and so on.

Some compounds (among them all those listed above) preserve their type in present-day English, others have undergone phonetic changes due to which their stems ceased to be homonymous to the corresponding free forms, so that the compounds themselves were turned into root words.

¹ Algonquin is the name of an American Indian tribe.

131

The phenomenon was investigated by Russian and Soviet philologists V.A. Bogoroditsky, L.A. Bulakhovsky and N.N. Amosova, who used the Russian term опрощение основы which may be translated into English as “simplification of stem” (but this translation can be only tentative). Simplification is defined as “a morphological process by which a word of a complex morphological structure loses the meaning of its separate morphological parts and becomes a mere symbol of the notion given."¹

The English grammarians, such as J.C. Nesfield, for instance, used the term disguised compounds, which is inconvenient because it is misleading. In English, when a morpheme becomes the constituent of a compound, this does not affect its sound pattern. Exceptions to this rule signify therefore that the formation cannot be regarded as a compound at the present stage of the language development, although it might have been the result of compounding at some earlier stage.

The degree of change can be very different. Sometimes the compound is altered out of all recognition. Thus, in the name of the flower daisy, or in the word woman composition as the basis of the word’s origin can be discovered by etymological analysis only: daisy<OE daeзes eaзe ‘day’s eye’; woman<OE wifmann, i.e. ‘woman person’. Other examples are: aught<OE awiht ‘anything whatever’; barn<OE bere-ærn ‘a place for keeping barley’; elbow<OE elnboзa, i.e. ‘the bending of the arm’; gossip<OE зodsibbe ‘godparent’ (originally ‘fellow sponsor at baptism’ (sibb/sib means ‘akin’)); husband<OE husbonda ‘master of the house’ (from bua ‘dwell’).

Demotivation (the Russian term is деэтимологизация) is closely connected with simplification, but not identical with it: rather they are different aspects of changes that may occur simultaneously. De-motivation is in fact etymological isolation when the word loses its ties with other word or words with which it was formerly connected and associated, ceases to be understood as belonging to its original word-family. For instance, kidnap ‘steal (a child) or carry off a person by illegal practice’ literally means ‘to seize a young goat’. The second syllable is from an obsolete word nap, probably closely related to nab (a slang word for ‘arrest’). In present-day English all associations with goats or nabbing are forgotten, the word is isolated from its etymological relatives and functions as a simple sign.

The process of demotivation begins with semantic change. The change of sound form comes later. There is for some time a contradiction between meaning and form, but in the long run this contradiction is overcome, as the word functions not on the strength of the meaning of the components but as a whole indivisible structure.

In many cases the two processes, the morphological and the semantic one, go hand in hand: lady<OE hlæsfdiзe (hlaf ‘loaf, diзe ‘knead’), i.e. ‘the person who kneads bread’; lord<OE hlaford, originally ‘breadkeeper’. Both words have become morphologically indivisible and have changed their meaning, so that neither of them is connected with the word loaf.

¹ See: Богородицкий В.А. Общий курс русской грамматики. 2-е изд. Казань, 1907. С. 13.

132

There are cases where one of the processes, namely demotivation, is complete, while simplification is still under way. We are inclined to rate such words as boatswain, breakfast, cupboard as compounds, because they look like compounds thanks to their conservative spelling that shows their origin, whereas in meaning and pronunciation they have changed completely and turned into simple signs for new notions. For example, breakfast originates from the verb break ‘interrupt’ and the noun fast ‘going without food’. Phonetically, had it been a compound, it should sound ['breikfa:st ], whereas in reality it is ['brekfastl. The compound is disguised as the vowels have changed; this change corresponds to a change in meaning (the present meaning is ‘the first meal of the day’).

To take another example, the word boatswain ['bousn] ‘ship’s officer in charge of sails, rigging, etc. and summoning men to duty with whistle’ originates from Late OE batsweзen. The first element is of course the modern boat, whereas the second swain is archaic: its original meaning was ‘lad’. This meaning is lost. The noun swain came to mean ‘a young rustic’, ‘a bucolic lover’.

All these examples might be regarded as borderline cases, as simplification is not yet completed graphically.