Redundant Morphemes

The phenomemon of redundant morphemes in borrowed expressions is pretty well known: the hoi polloi 'the the people', the al-Aqsa mosque 'the the farthest'.  I posted about a fictional example of this a few months ago, but I just came across a real-world example in a post on Octopus Dropkick (note: some content not safe for work, but still really funny), via a post on Boing Boing.  The post concerns the underground waterways of Tokyo, and mentions the "edogawa river".  The word edogawa (江戸川) is made up of edo, the old name of Tokyo, and gawa, the word for river (actually kawa, but phonology is, as always, in effect).  Hence, edogawa river, 'Edo river river'.

I wanted to use Google to find out how often edogawa is used in the phrase "edogawa river" as opposed to just "edogawa", but it turns out that there's also a city named Edogawa, so a bare occurrence of the word may refer either to the city or to the river.  With that caveat in mind, there are about 480 hits for "edogawa river" (pages that include that exact phrase), but about 5,320 for edogawa river -"edogawa river" (pages that mention edogawa and river, but not the phrase edogawa river), so it seems that for this particular borrowing, the redundant usage is less common that the non-redundant usage.

I don't think this kind of redundancy is necessarily an error.  Let's suppose you wanted to avoid it in this case.  How would you go about it?  You could translate the morpheme kawa and use Edo river, I suppose, but if you then started to refer to it as "the Edo" like we refer to "the Nile" or "the Mississippi", you run the risk of having it mistranslated back into Japanese as simply 江戸, which is the city, not the river.  Edogawa river might actually be the clearest way to render it.

Comments

[Dorothea Salo]

Steven Brust does a wonderful riff on this phenomenon in one of his books, explaining at considerable length how a particular ford got a name that translates to "Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford."

[chris waigl]

You can also have deletions. Tiananmen Square in Beijing is often called "Platz des himmlischen Friedens" (Heavely Peace Square) in the German media, leaving out the gate.

On the other hand, borrowings needn't even be involved. "Today" in French is aujourd'hui, where "hui" comes from Latin hodie, meaning "today". In journalistic and political speech, you can even hear "au jour d'aujord'hui" (for "as of today"), which contains "today" three times.

[Angelo]

The best one I've heard is "The La Brea Tarpits" in LA. "La brea" is Spanish for 'the tar', so really "The The Tar Tarpits" (a friend of mine always got a kick out of this).

[Stephen Mulraney]

The many River Avons in Britain are all 'River Rivers', 'avon' coming the Welsh word (afon?) for river. I don't know the Welsh word, but 'avon' is similar enough to the Irish 'abhainn' that the meaning is obvious.

It's very common in Ireland too: there are lots of little rivers all over the country called in English "River Owenxxxx" for some value of xxxx. In Irish it'd be "Abhainn xxxx". I can't think of any actual examples right now, since I don't think there are any large rivers with this kind of name. I've seen the kind of name on tiny streams all over the country on bridge-side signs.

[Russell]

Yeah, my dad told me about the La Brea Tarpits the first time we went there together (or at some point thereafter). You see a lot of this in Japan, especially in names of temples and shrines. Kinkakji Temple (kinkaku temple temple), anyone? Perhaps your store is located on Midosuji Avenue (mido avenue avenue)? I'm not sure if it's really better to give a morphologically faithful translation. Afterall, there's a reason they don't translate subway stops and such -- people in Osaka know where the doobutsuen-mae stop is, but no one will know what you're talking about if you ask for the "in front of the zoo" stop. =)

[Tim May]

After a similar comment thread at Languagehat, which I can't now find, I thought of a plausible triple-article construction, but for some reason I didn't google for it until today.

The La Alhambra lobby bar has live music...

That's the The The Red lobby bar, etymologically.

(Interestingly enough, this kind of usage, which seems legitimate if amusing, is greatly outnumbered online by references to the actual Andalusian palace as "the La Alhambra".)

[Margaret S.]

One might think they have to be borrowed (so that the English speaker doesn't recognize the redundancy) but it isn't so; "ATM machine" is an oft-cited example.

[language hat]

Here's the LH thread in question:
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000456.php

To quote myself:
To speak English correctly, you don't need to know any other languages... "Al" in Arabic means 'the,' so "the Alhambra" is redundant ('the the red') and should be eschewed. Not silly enough for you? How about this: "the Paraguay River" etymologically means 'the river river river'! That's right, para means 'river' and so does guay. The same is true of "the Yenisei River"; Evenki (y)ene means 'big river' and ses means 'river.' We are led to the conclusion that either 1) everyone must learn all other languages before daring to speak their own, or 2) "the hoi polloi" is perfectly good English, being the standard usage ever since it was first borrowed. "Hoi polloi" is treated in English as an unanalyzable compound, and that is as it should be.

[language hat]

In case it's not clear from the above: there's nothing in the slightest wrong, or even redundant, about "the Edogawa River." Redundancy is a meaningful concept only within a language. Picking out cross-language equivalencies is a fun parlor game, but attacking expressions like "the hoi polloi" reveals an inability to think clearly.

[Big Ben]

Thank you, language hat!
That "the 'hoi polloi' is redundant" business has always annoyed me. If you can't alternatively say "the polloi" in standard English, then it ain't redundant.

About Japanese rivers and such, the weird thing is that although there seems to be general agreeement about which keep the 'kawa" morpheme, there doesn't seem to be a recognizable pattern about which these would be. For the major rivers in Tokyo, Edogawa always seems to be Edogawa River and Arakawa always seems to be Arakawa River, but Sumidagawa is usually Sumida River, and Tamagawa is ususally Tama River.
The even weirder thing is that this somehow feels natural to me as a bilingual foregner.

[Big Ben]

...a bilingual foreigner who can't spell.

[The Tensor]

Hmm, far be it from me to prescriptivize, but I think the issue of whether it's redundant or not is more complicated than that. In this case, very few English speakers are likely to know that "kawa" is river, and so it's perfectly reasonable (if entertaining for languages bloggers) to call it the "Edogawa river". However, I think the more widely known or closely related the foreign language is, the closer it becomes to a mistake to add the redundant morpheme. For example, "Rio Grande River", with 76,700 ghits, sounds pretty bad to my ear (and I don't speak Spanish, I just grew up in SoCal), and other people must think so too, because "Rio Grande" -"Rio Grande River" gets 7,560,000 ghits.

[Big Ben]

Obviously there's repetition going on, but redundancy usually implies excess, and "～kawa River" and "Rio ～ River" are only excessive if one is familiar with the other language. That "Rio Grande River" got over 76,000 hits implies that many native speakers haven't been exposed to enough Spanish to find it redundant.
To clarify, I would never use any of the "kawa River" variants with bilingual friends--it would feel redundant to say more than "kawa"--but for monolingual English speakers I don't think redundancy is a fair charge. Or rather, it's redundant in some senses of the word "redundant", but it's important to note that it's not "redundant" in the sense of wrong or silly or stylistically bad.

"The hoi polloi", however, ain't even in a gray area. Neither "hoi" nor "polloi" exist separately in English or even as components in other expressions--"hoi polloi" is one lexical item, and it's a standard non-count noun in English, readily taking a definite article.