Comment by shagie
12 hours ago
Ablaut reduplication is my favorite thing from linguistics. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English )
Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag.
It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.
Learning about the order of adjectives (big old red ball - try swapping any of those around) when I was dabbling in Klingon and the affix contests ( https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix and https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes ).
> It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.
And from this we can extrapolate what flip flops would be called if we had three feet!
Also see https://www.poetryverse.com/spike-milligan-poems/on-ning-nan...