I guess I must watch Star Trek or I won't really belong to this community. It's come up so many times.

Or was it Star wars?

Hmm. Don't remember.

@Færd Lol, I've never really watched it either. I've seen like one episode at a friend's house, and the movies which take place in an alternate universe

That makes two of us then. I feel better now.

@tchrist I wonder what's inside that pastry shell.

And if the colors of the apples (two reds and one green) are of any significance.

Looks nice altogether.

@Færd no need. Like any topic here it only goes as far as what people care about. There's always something more to talk about.

So no strong recommendation.

Like support of terrorsts by states

Heh. That's my fave.

@sumelic A crape sounds like a crepe after its been digested...

That's a crap

And a bad cough is the croup

And a member of a gang in Los Angeles is a Crip

And a drain on your pocket is craps.

And you beat a horse with a... wait... one plant in a field is a crop

And a dead body is a corpse

You're a creep.

And a small stand of trees is a copse

@Færd Cripes!

ت

Sounds crsipy.

I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here.

That doesn't fit the pattern

Just discovered an interesting show on Netflix: Samurai Gourmet ...

You will have to watch it with subtitles, though, since it's not dubbed.

I like it for that reason. Lets me work on my rusty Japanese again ...

Curiously, though, they call the guy a samurai, but the Japanese clearly refers to the samurai the modern-day retiree is channeling as a nobushi, which means a robber or brigand. I'd always thought ronin was the term for masterless man, unemployed samurai, but ... weird.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, offensive answer detected: What is the possessive for several names? by Hell on english.SE

I don't know if everyone here has already voted, but John Hamilton's answer to the question about the use of "small small" in Indian English only needs a few more votes to reach the top of the page: english.stackexchange.com/a/389778/77227

@Færd Don't worry, it's fairly superficial and not especially interesting.

It can be addictive.

@sumelic The answer is interesting, but if I were to vote on it, it'd probably be down because the context in question seems to be an emphatic use of reduplication.

It particularly seems to match the context of Roger Miller's Tall Tall Trees. However to be fair, I do not speak Indian English, so I have little to no right to judge correctness on this matter anyway.

@Ghalib Generally speaking, that's fair, given that any given language is supposed to be a shared method of communication, so it usually shouldn't matter. The only reason I mention it here is that the question is specifically requesting dialectical information.

@Ghalib However, if I had to guess, I would suggest that means you predominantly speak American English. The reason for that is that it seems to be the most likely source. All of the commonwealth nations combined only amount to approximately 128,000,000 people, as opposed to the U.S.A's. 318,000,000~. The only English speaking nation with a larger population is India, but it's not purely an English speaking nation, so it's harder to directly compare.

Then again, your proximity to India may also be of considerable influence, and I don't really know what the features are.

@Ghalib I hypothesize many E.S.L. speakers pick up British orthography because of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (O.A.L.D.), and possibly Cambridge's too.

Granted, now there's the Oxford American Dictionary which is supposed to be the equivalent of O.A.L.D. for Am. English, but that's a recent addition and doesn't have learner's in the name (meaning its purpose isn't especially evident).

@Ghalib Given the proximity and relative populations of the nations, I would imagine that Pakistani English is to Indian English what Canadian English is to American English.

Perhaps slightly different but probably not enough to generally warrant special notice.

@Ghalib If I recall correctly, @Cerberus suggested learning Latin as a first of the romantic languages, because it makes it easier to learn all of them.

Granted, when I say that, German is obviously a Germanic language but ...

@Ghalib No. It'd be useful for me to learn Japanese, but I really don't have the patience for it, and I am also not even sure if I even have the intellect to learn another language.

@Ghalib And video games.

@Ghalib There are so many choices and considerations to make that it is difficult to get bored with them.

I had a couple of video game related dreams, but not very many.

@Ghalib It doesn't really benefit them. XP

@Tonepoet Yay! That is correct.

And knowing English makes learning Latin somewhat easier.

Lingua Latina per se Illustrata by Orberg is now popular. The first page:

See if you can understand anything on that page.

"Barely" is just right!

Yay!

You can ask about things you don't understand.

Indeed, English letters were borrowed from Latin.

If you want to go to the next page, change the 1 into a 2, at the end of the url.

Good.

Hmm, too bad.

Yeah, much has changed.

If anyone who read the Quran were brandishing an AK 47, I think the world would have a little bit of a problem hehe.

And if anyone who read the Bible were brandishing a crusader's sword.

Etc.

Sure, you can say that.

Although I don't think it's necessary.

@Robusto He aquí el nuevo análisis del segundo trailer de Juego de Tronos para ti.

Of course, the alternate ye- spelling on words beginning hie- is mostly an American phenomenon. Hence hierba/yerba.

> Las dos formas son correctas. El Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE) recomienda la grafía con ‘h’ (hierba), pero las dos escrituras se pueden usar indistintamente.

Surprised there's no question on this on Spanish Language.

> El nombre femenino hierba o yerba es una planta de tamaño pequeño, su tallo es muy frágil y perece luego de producir la semilla. // Grupo de estas plantas que crecen en áreas donde pasta el ganado. // Se llama hierba a las manchas de las esmeraldas. // Pócima de hierbas venenosas. // Algunas drogas, por ejemplo, la mariguana o marihuana.

I never in the world knew that imperfections in emeralds might be called grass.

"mancha" is stain.

I wonder what other drugs the word could apply to besides to cáñamo.

> Se a sua esmeralda tem manchas de ferrugem laranja ou marrom, você pode removê-los com uma solução de ácido oxálico .

Oh maybe not imperfection but rather tarnish or whatever you call it.

And yes, the last quote is in Portuguese not Spanish, but whatever.

yerba mate

Yup!

Which American marketing misspells as yerba maté so you don’t pronounce the word like the English word mate as in ship’s mate or checkmate etc.

hehe

Unfortunately, most of us read an acute accent as imparting phonemically significant syllable stress, which messed up everything.

como se dice "hyena"?

En que sentido? En castellano?

castellano, hiena, lo veo

Son hiénidos esas bestias.

Incluso hiena.

oh, ok

/i-E-na/

y no comen hierbas

No.

Sino carne viva.

O muerta, da igual.

They aren't picky. :)

Que no son muy fastidiosas las hienas.

@sumelic that answer really bothers me because it is not an answer to the OPs question. He is explicitly saying "In my language, which is not yours, doubling means X" that is the nonnest of non-answers. It is a great answer for his language but we have no idea how things work in the OP's.

@caub Unless they're German: Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. —Brahms

For all flesh is like the grasses’ blooms.

(eliding und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen for convenience’ sake)

@Mitch I hadn't realized you could have superlative nuns.

@tchrist haha. Now you do

hehe, disculpame, mi conecion not esta buena

Mother Superior shall be jealous.

Maximum, maximal, whatever

@Mitch Yes: Worth further note is that the language isn't necessarily even a variety of English.

@caub La tuviste correcta escrita con dos ces: conección. Los franceses e ingleses solemos introducir otra n y (mal-)escribir conneción pero es así. Hace falta dos ces porqué cada una lleva un sonido distinto: la primera dice /k/ y la segunda o bien /θ/ (theta) o bien /s/.

@Mitch Maximillian!

vale, notado, ah mejor con ethernet

@Cerberus Ah, OK then.

Do you have a favorite TV show?

2 and 4 aren't quite right, are they?

@Færd No, they don't work. I think passives with stranded prepositions are only possible with intransitive verbs.

@Mitch Did you see the citations that John Hamilton added at the end? They all refer to Indian English specifically, and say things like:

> Reduplication used for emphasis and to indicate a distributive meaning: I bought some small small things; Why you don't give them one one piece of cake? - books.google.com.tr/…

> And if you hear This house has small small room the meaning is not "a very small room" but "several small rooms". The reduplication expresses plurality. - books.google.com.tr/…

Combined with the OP's own statement that "My guess is that this is merely used to express a plural form," this convinces me that the quoted examples don't mean "very big mountains" and "very small houses".

@sumelic No I didn't see these additions.

I'm going through these extras now, but in the meantime, these references only serve to confuse and contradict his own statements.

He still starts off saying things about Turkish (that was not edited), then he goes on to just say that it means 'many' or 'a number of'. Nothing about the unedited part says anything about Indian English.

@Mitch I edited the answer a minute ago to change the structure. See if you find that more convincing

Then the added part, in which reference is explicitly about Indian English but his answer doesn't say that, says "emphasis and distribution" (I don't know what distribution is supposed to mean from the examples). But emphasis is different from number. So which is it?

@sumelic I wouldn't edit it, I would throw the original part away as it is entirely speculation.

@Mitch Unfortunately, it is hard to tell what is meant by "emphasis" in the quotations. I think the strongest quote is the one from Crystal, which explicitly warns against assuming that "small small" means "very small"

@Mitch: It seems that reduplication can be used in different ways in Indian English, but I think there is a lot of evidence that in this particular circumstance ("small small houses" and "big big mountains") the emphasis is on the numerosity rather than the size of the houses and mountains

The reference to encyclopedia.com I trust more than anything so far.

So I am inclined to think 'very' is correct.

But all that stuff he put in originally is both speculative and wrong.

@Mitch :( You don't trust David Crystal? He's a respected linguist and writer about English

as an aside, what do you think 'distributive' means here? I really don't think it is what he said, but rather I feel like 'I gave them one one cake' means 'I gave each of them one piece of one cake'

@Mitch Yes, that seems to be the meaning. "Distributive" means the meaning contains an implicit "each".

@sumelic wait...what does emphasis mean? doesn't it mean 'very' instead of 'many'?

@Mitch The thing is, I think it's unclear. The sources don't say what quality is supposed to be emphasized. The most natural interpretation is that it is the quality described by the adjective (which would have a sense of "very") but I feel like emphasizing the quantity of something is also a type of emphasis.

@sumelic I don't disagree with that but it is not my first thought. And it surely is an option.

But now these references... are they contradicting each other?

@Mitch: And the thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if it is possible for reduplication to have the meaning of "very" in Indian English, in general. That's a common use of reduplication. I just don't think that's what's going on in the examples from the OP (and the OP doesn't think so either--nor does English Student).

anyway, the ELU question you're editing is, before all of this research, misleading (if not wrong).

and after the research, it is entirely separate from the OP.

@Mitch THe research is all John Hamilton's. I only edited for organization and to add in some quotes from the links.

@Mitch What do you mean by "entirely separate from the OP"? The citations seem extremely relevant

@sumelic I don't believe anything JH says about IndE.

I believe what he says about Turkish

@sumelic I meant JH

(as the OP of the answer, but OP should be reserved for the question asker)

@Mitch JH doesn't really seem to assert much about IndE. I don't think he has personal experience with it either; what I'm convinced by are the citations, the fact that this meshes with what the OP and English Student said, while the other answers ignore their comments about the meaning of this expression, and to a lesser extent, the confirmation that there are some languages (e.g. Turkish) where reduplication has this meaning.

@sumelic Yes, the citations are very relevant, but as we've found, are not exactly the clearest for our needs. The Crystal one is clear in that one example is definitely 'many'.

but it wasn't clear if redup could be used for emphasis too.

@sumelic That redup can mean 'many' in some language is useful here, but only as an aside.

The meaning seems to be rather context-based: books.google.com/…

@Mitch: Here is another source that gives a more in-depth analysis. It argues that the meaning of reduplicated expressions like "hot-hot" in Indian English is better approximated by "nicely hot" than "very hot" (p. 33): halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00449691/document

haha... what a mess.

reality seems not to be consistent.

Or maybe it is just outsiders trying to figure it out who are inconsistent

In English, reduplication means... very. or.....

@tchrist Muchas gracias. Lo voy a ver más tarde.

it can mean 'literally'

"I'm attending the lecture tonight". "Are you going-going or are you just listening in to the webcast from your dorm room?"

if 'literally' is the word I want.

maybe emphasis works there too.

emphasis means what you want it to mean

distribution, on the other hand, means something very particular, but we just don't know exactly what. (or I don't)

is ambiguity one form of vagueness or is it the other way round?

@Robusto Buen provecho.

@sumelic that article seems to cover things nicely. It is about Hindi alone (which is not necessarily the source for all IndE-isms) but for simplicity's sake we can take it that way.

it supports your ideas that it is context based, and the reduplication covers many features, intensification ('very'), number, and is used for adjectives, nouns, verbs, even question words. so reality is complex.

@sumelic The most important rule regarding references, after proper citation that is, is to summarize their content and/or quote them so that the answer is independently useful.

@sumelic Moreover, there's something wrong in applying this particular reference to the provided context. Note that "small small room" isn't pluralized with an s, whereas big big mountains, and small small houses from the provided context of the question are.

It vaguely comes off as writing "My mighty oxens can plow the mountains to the ground!"

@Tonepoet I wouldn't say it is wrong, just a complicating factor. As Mitch notes, some of the sources discuss other languages (e.g. Hindi) and the Crystal source is specifically talking about Indian pidgin English, which does have some differences from more formal/standardized registers of Indian English. However, I don't see any reason to suppose that the use of reduplication is one of these differences

@sumelic I'm not so sure. David Crystal even says the noun isn't pluralized because the reduplication already conveys the sense of more than one.