OKAY SO. ABOUT THIS

this is really interesting linguistically

ATM machine: this is a true redundancy, also referred to by RAS Syndrome (Recursive Acronym Syndrom Syndrome)

naan bread, chai tea: yes nominally these translate to "bread bread" and "tea tea", but

using a different language's word for the same thing denotes that "naan bread" is "bread in the style of bread (from this other language)"

because in english, the mental concept of "tea" is different from the mental concept of "chai"

(this differs from something like "The La Brea Tar Pits", because a tar pit is a tar pit everywhere. there isn't a different meaning or connotation of tar pit in spanish-speaking countries)

Torpenhow Hill: i know the common conception is that this is a quadruple tautology that translates to "hill-hill-hill hill" but apparently there's no official evidence that any place named as such ever actually existed

there is a village named Torpenhow (pronounced "trepenneh" locally, because english english is a fuck) and a Torpenhow Hall

that sits on the ridge of a hill

but this got conflated into "Torpenhow Hill" by a writer creating a dictionary of english place names in the 17th century

and then linguists ran away with it

for many reasons, place names end up tautological. there are a lot of examples of such

anyway sorry you hit on a special interest i hope that wasn't too much

I was just making a silly joke but I’m glad it stimulated your special interest

omg

i love this and the lesson that came with it

alqemizzy: the Naan bread and chai tea is very neat because English does that A LOT and it's not just lazy it's a style of linguistics

alqemizzy:

Also you know nothing about my tar pits!

I love how I knew these were all redundancies, but I literally just didn't register them. Redundancy is so ingrained in American speech that I didn't even realize this was a joke until alqemizzy 's explanation and then everything clicked.

It does make total sense that [foreign word - English word] indicates thing, but specifically that version.

It helps, because we Americans as a whole tend to be uncultured swine.

it's not just Americans though it's English

this is fun. more english lessions please

analoren: did you know that the English language has a fixed adjective order?

i.e. there's a specific ordering to the categories of adjectives that you use to modify a noun. quantity, opinion, size, age/shape, color, origin, material, purpose

so you can say "one nice little old round white brick house" but not "one round nice brick white old little house"

is there any rhyme or reason to that?

alqemizzy: and it's one of the things that english as 2nd language speakers really struggle with, because it's a specific order that I don't know how many english speakers can actually explain other than "it hits the ear wrong".

tbh it's not just English that does this, it's just that certain language families are more or less flexible because of whatever Reasons