Reduplication
grammar, most notably in Malayo-Polynesian where it forms plurals:
Bahasa Malay rumah, house, rumah-rumah, houses.
Hawaiian has the important example of Wiki-wiki!
Nama uses reduplication to increase the force of a verb:
Go, “look”, Go-go, “examine with attention”.
Chinese also uses reduplication:
ren, “person”,
renren, “everybody”
Indo-European languages formerly used reduplication to form a number of verb forms, especially in the preterite or perfect tenses. In the older Indo-European languages, many such verbs survive:
- spondeo, spopondi (Latin, “I vow, I vowed”)
- λείπω, λέλοιπα (Greek, “I am missing, I was missing”)
- háitan, haíháit (Gothic, “to name, I named”)
None of these sorts of forms survive in modern English, although they existed in its parent Germanic languages.
See also: augment
