Earlier week I learned something new about the English language, which isn’t something I get to say often. It was this:
Consider the following common words and expressions: clip clop, tick tock, flip flop. All three of course are onomatopoeiac, replicating the sounds of what they describe: horses’ hooves, a clock, and the sound of flip flops on the ground respectively. When you think about it though, all four of a horse’s hooves make the same sound, as do both flip flops in a pair, and a ticking clock. Why then do we include two different sounds in each phrase, and why does it sound so weird to reverse the two parts (e.g. tock tick)? This is all due to an unwritten rule in English that, if you’re a native speaker, you’ve been following all this time without knowing it.
Reduplication is a common process in which a word is immediately repeated exactly (bang bang!!), with a single changed consonant sound (lovey-dovey, nitty-gritty) or a single changed vowel sound (the examples above, in addition to hip hop, tic-tac, tip-top and many more). We can’t just use reduplication willy-nilly though: there are rules involved. If there are three words (and a change in vowel sound), then they have to be in the order I, A, O (ding, dang, dong!). If there are only two words, which is more common, the first must be I, and the second is either A or O.
This rule is so strong that it can even override other ones, such as the similarly unwritten but universally-followed rule about adjective order. According to this rule, which was brought to a lot of people’s attention last year, the individual harassing the Three Little Pigs was the Bad (opinion) Big (size) Wolf. But, that would violate the I, A, O rule of reduplication, so we call him the Big Bad Wolf.
No-one really knows where this rule comes from. It might have something to do with the movements of the tongue in ancient precursors of European languages. It may be related to psychology and the mysterious reasons we find certain sounds more pleasing than others. All we really know is that we all follow this rule without being aware, and it sounds really strange when we break the rule!
English-Language Thoughts 
Holy moly! I never knew!! Lol
LikeLiked by 1 person
I know, I had no idea about it either, but once you know you don’t know how you’d never noticed before!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Never thought of it!
In poetry, too, as I recall, like “Hickory dickory dock” and “Ding dong dell.”
I think you’re right, the short I is the easiest, most pleasant sound for starting out a rhyme.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wonder what it is about that sound. I think there’s also a link to the way short verbs with “i” follow a similar pattern: ring/rang/rung, sing/sang/sung, swim/swam/swum etc.
LikeLike
How odd. I only first read about this (ablaut reduplication) last week too.
LikeLike
I think I first saw it mentioned in a tweet liked by someone I follow, then went digging. I think there was a BBC article involved somewhere, which probably helped it spread quickly.
LikeLike
[…] when I was writing about ablaut reduplication, I read this article on the BBC website, which mentions this unwritten rule, and other structures […]
LikeLike
[…] Almost every major grammar rule you can think has at least a few exceptions. But then there are a few unwritten rules that English speakers adhere strictly to, even when we’re not aware of it. Still, English […]
LikeLike
[…] therefore more attracted to it (and yes, the shift from hang to hung is an example of the ablaut pattern). The regular form, on the other hand, no matter how prevalent it is now, is still newer and […]
LikeLike
[…] Hip-Hop music video “It’s Everyday Bro” was reacted to by dozens of other channels, including […]
LikeLike
[…] you can see the same basic meaning at work. And it’s also important to note that tall tale has a good rhythm to it, with the minimal vowel shift between the two words, and that’s a big part of its […]
LikeLike
[…] common that putting them together doesn’t feel strange. And even more importantly, they’ve got a nice rhythm. Facebook, one stressed syllable, one unstressed. Up, down. And something about the vowel sounds […]
LikeLike
[…] another of those rules you already knew without knowing […]
LikeLike
[…] of all, let’s not forget that I’ve already written about why we tick tock, and not tock tick (if you haven’t read that post, I recommend giving it a look before […]
LikeLike
I imagine that if I were operating a wolf farm, and evaluating the wolves in terms of their behavior as well as grouping them by size, I would be concerned with the differences amongst them. If one of the larger ones should be hostile to their smaller fellows, for example, I might remark, “That’s a bad big wolf.”
LikeLike