Talk:List of reduplicated place names

Page history

This list started as Category:Double-named places. This was finally deleted following conversion to this list as agreed at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2013 July 5. The discussions below, before today's date, are from the category talk page; I took the unusual decision to move the talk page here. – Fayenatic London 21:54, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

NY

Why in the world isn't "New York, New York" in this category? There's even a song about it: "The town so nice, they named it twice."71.219.230.36 (talk) 14:18, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

"New York, New York" isn't a reduplicated name. It's two separate names (the name of the city and the name of the state) that happen to be the same. —Bkell (talk) 19:57, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Misleading term

It's a delightful category, but the title "Double-named places" is misleading, since there is already a Wikipedia List of double placenames in which the doubleness consists of merging two former placenames into a new single placename. A more accurate linguistic term would be Reduplicative placenames. See Reduplication. So let's rename it. Tacitus 21:07, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Attribution

This category was originally created and the description therein written by Swestrup under "Category:Double-Named Places", which was speedy renamed per CfD speedy renaming conventions on May 17, 2006. Edit history transcribed as follows:

• 18:36, 17 May 2006 . . BD2412 (empty for deletion per CfD)
• 04:13, 16 May 2006 . . Longhair ({{cfr|Double-named places}})
• 21:15, 29 April 2006 . . Swestrup
• 21:03, 29 April 2006 . . Swestrup
• 20:39, 29 April 2006 . . Swestrup (Created a new Category)

--bd2412 T 18:42, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

That commentary has just been removed from the category page, but for the record the latest version was:

There are a number of places in the world with doubled names, often as a result of the grammatical rules of the local language from which the name derives. In some Indonesian languages, for instance, it is common to pluralize a noun by doubling the word. Thus 'orang' might mean 'man', while 'orang orang' would mean 'men'. The linguistic term for this is reduplication.

There is a greater clustering of double-named places in Indonesia, Australia, and Oceania than elsewhere, but these names occur in Africa, the Americas and Europe as well.

References

Many of the world's double-named places are rather obscure and so either do not have Wikipedia entries yet, or have entries that are not marked as members of this Category. Below are links to more complete geographical lists.

• Twice Named Places
• A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia, Page 2.

– Fayenatic London 18:21, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Non-place repeated names

What list should be used for repeated names that are not place names? Such as:

• Dum-dum bullets
• Dum-dum fever Tabletop (talk) 03:28, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Or animals?

• Bufo bufo
• Tsetse fly Norman21 (talk) 15:33, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Dum-dum bullets are named after the British arsenal in Dum Dum West Bengal, which place is included in this list.

Bufo bufo is a standard binomial form where the first element is the genus and the second is the species. There are many animals for which the two elements are identical, but they nonetheless represent different levels of categorisation and this form is thus analogous to 'New York, New York' discussed above.John M Brear (talk) 09:58, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Real and apparent reduplication

Bora Bora (which brought me here) is a genuine reduplication reflecting the grammar of the local language.

Nene is not. It is merely an accident of spelling. To be a genuine reduplication it would need a precursor form *ne-ne, for which there is no evidence. Just as 'scene' and 'seen' are pronounced indistinguishably in British English, so are 'Nene' and 'Neen' - which latter is a local name for another English river.

If someone with more knowledge (and time!) than I could classify these names as genuine (grammatical, onomatopoeic...) or accidental it would avoid potential misunderstandings. John M Brear (talk) 10:09, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Absolutely. There are several doubled vowels (Aa in Estonia, for example); in itself this says nothing, because in many languages double vowels occur as part of the spelling system ("peep" in English, even!) Å is a place in Norway, but in old Danish spelling the "A-ring" is just written "Aa". Estonian is likely to be the same. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:29, 30 May 2019 (UTC)