Friday words #315

By | September 30, 2022

This post continues a Facebook post I made a few days ago. I was initially inspired by a couple of photos I’d taken of what I was calling bilingual pleonasms:

Sign for a Spanish-language church that reads "Iglesia Church"
Sign at a public park that reads "Strand Beach"

A pleonasm is using more words than you need to. Examples are expressions like 10:00 AM in the morning (because AM already indicates morning), free gift (if it’s not free, it isn’t a gift), and PIN number (because PIN stands for “personal identification number,” so number in PIN number is redundant).

What had caught my eye in the signs I photographed, though, was that the pleonasm was in two languages. In Spanish, iglesia is “church,” so Iglesia Church is “church church.” In German, Strand means “beach,” so Strand Beach means “beach beach.”

In response to my post, Friend Zander Westendarp posted the following photo that he’d taken in Houston:

Sign for a restaurant that reads "Little Papasito's".

In this case, the -ito ending in Spanish is a diminutive, so Little in front of Papasito’s is redundant (“little little Papa’s”).

There are many of these expressions. I knew some, and people who commented on the FB post contributed others. I also found a list in (where else?) Wikipedia. Here’s a sampling:

  • ahi tuna. In Hawaiian, the word ‘ahi means “tuna.”
  • chai tea. Chay is “tea” in Hindi, Urdu, and some other languages.
  • head honcho. Hanchō means “leader” in Japanese. (Which I covered earlier.)
  • naan bread. Naan means “bread” in Hindi.
  • pita bread. Pita is from a Greek word for “bread.”
  • rice pilaf. Pilaf is from a Persian word that means “rice.”
  • the hoi polloi. Hoi means “the” in Greek.
  • Sharia law. Shari’ah is Arabic for “law.”

Some of these pairs are also reflected in place names (toponyms), like these:

  • Avon River. Avon comes from the Welsh word for “river.”
  • Mississippi River. The name Mississippi goes back to an Algonquin name Misi-ziibi, meaning “Big River.”
  • Rio Grande River. Rio means “river” in Spanish.
  • Sahara Desert. Sahara is Arabic for “desert.”
  • Sierra Nevada mountains. Sierra is the Spanish word for “mountain range.”

There are more of these pairs, but you get the idea.

As I said, I was inclined to call these bilingual pleonasms. As it turns out, there is a kind of established term for these: bilingual tautological expressions. At least, that’s what I found on Wikipedia when I investigated the word pleonasm. So I guess the question of what to call these is resolved. (The Wikipedia article about these tautological expressions has examples in other languages as well; it isn’t a phenomenon unique to English by any means.)

We can have an interesting discussion about the extent to which monolingual pleonasms/tautologies are errors. But it’s really hard to fault English speakers for using tautological expressions when one of the words isn’t even originally from English. (I am a pretty firm believer that you don’t have to know other languages in order to speak English.) That’s particularly true for toponyms like Avon River and Sahara Desert because for us the non-English part is simply a name, not a common noun as such.

Moreover, for some of the everyday expressions, the non-English part of the tautological expression has often taken on a specific meaning in English, so that the expression isn’t as tautological as it looks. Sure, chai tea is tautological in a strictly etymological sense. But for us, chai is a particular formulation of tea. I’d venture that you won’t get far in conversation by referring to Sharia without adding law to it. And people will probably think you’ve made an error, despite your etymological correctness, if you refer to “music that’s popular with hoi polloi.”

There are some other bilingual tautologies that you might also know:

  • please RSVP. RSVP is an initialism from the French expression répondez s’il vous plait (“please respond”), so this reads as “please please respond.”
  • [a sandwich] with au jus. The word au means “with” in French, so this becomes “with with juice.”
  • soup du jour of the day. In French, du jour means “of the day,” so this is “soup of the day of the day.”

A couple of these examples came up in a recent Merriam-Webster Word Matters podcast. As Peter Sokolowski explains during the podcast, in these expressions, the redundant terms are examples of lexicalization: we now think of these bits and pieces as words onto themselves, not as constituent parts that have individual meaning. The clearest example is RSVP, which we now treat as a noun meaning “response” (“We got three RSVPs”) or a verb meaning “respond” (“No one RSVPed”). Its relationship to the original French phrase is virtually opaque. For au jus, we treat the entire expression as a noun meaning “juice, gravy.” Sokolowski speculates that in soup du jour of the day, the du jour part is intended to mean a daily special, so that the writer probably means something like “our soup special of the day.”

If you happen to know other languages, it can be fun to spot bilingual tautological expressions like these. It’s also interesting to tease out how a term like chai or au jus can take on its own, English-specific meaning. But for purposes of English, these expressions are all no harm, no foul.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.