denoting repetition, e.g., hita-’ato “to fall out,” hita-’ahl “to keep falling out”; mat-achisht-utl “to fly on to the water,” mat-achisht-ohl “to keep flying on to the water.”  Further, the hl of certain elements changes to a peculiar h-sound in plural forms, e.g., yak-ohl “sore-faced,” yak-oh “sore-faced (people).”

[Footnote 45:  These orthographies are but makeshifts for simple sounds.]

Nothing is more natural than the prevalence of reduplication, in other words, the repetition of all or part of the radical element.  The process is generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance.  Even in English it is not unknown, though it is not generally accounted one of the typical formative devices of our language.  Such words as goody-goody and to pooh-pooh have become accepted as part of our normal vocabulary, but the method of duplication may on occasion be used more freely than is indicated by such stereotyped examples.  Such locutions as a big big man or Let it cool till it’s thick thick are far more common, especially in the speech of women and children, than our linguistic text-books would lead one to suppose.  In a class by themselves are the really enormous number of words, many of them sound-imitative or contemptuous in psychological tone, that consist of duplications with either change of the vowel or change of the initial consonant—­words of the type sing-song, riff-raff, wishy-washy, harum-skarum, roly-poly.  Words of this type are all but universal.  Such examples as the Russian Chudo-Yudo (a dragon), the Chinese ping-pang “rattling of rain on the roof,"[46] the Tibetan kyang-kyong “lazy,” and the Manchu porpon parpan “blear-eyed” are curiously reminiscent, both in form and in psychology, of words nearer home.  But it can hardly be said that the duplicative process is of a distinctively grammatical significance in English.  We must turn to other languages for illustration.  Such cases as Hottentot go-go “to look at carefully” (from go “to see"), Somali fen-fen “to gnaw at on all sides” (from fen “to gnaw at"), Chinook iwi iwi “to look about carefully, to examine” (from iwi “to appear"), or Tsimshian am’am “several (are) good” (from am “good”) do not depart from the natural and fundamental range of significance of the process.  A more abstract function is illustrated in Ewe,[47] in which both infinitives and verbal adjectives are formed from verbs by duplication; e.g., yi “to go,” yiyi “to go, act of going”; wo “to do,” wowo[48] “done”; mawomawo “not to do” (with both duplicated verb stem and duplicated negative particle).  Causative duplications are characteristic of Hottentot, e.g., gam-gam[49] “to cause to tell” (from gam “to tell").  Or the process may be used to derive verbs from nouns, as in Hottentot khoe-khoe “to talk Hottentot” (from khoe-b “man, Hottentot"), or as in Kwakiutl metmat “to eat clams” (radical element met- “clam").