Somebody wrote please RSVP to me the other day, and it occurred to me that this is a pleonasm in its purest form—redundancy, tautology—since RSVP is répondez s’il vous plaît, and the please is already in there, in French, waiting.
The prescriptive tradition, and its discontents
English has a long tradition of disapproving of this sort of thing. Fowler built a career on it, and Strunk and White reduced the whole doctrine to three words: omit needless words.
Place names are the classic battlefield. It is generally frowned upon to attach a generic term to a name that already contains one, except that transparency is in the eye of the beholder. Not everybody knows that Gobi is simply Mongolian for “desert,” or that East Timor means “east east,” timor being Malay for east. The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are, word for word, “the the tar tar pits.”
English’s own favourite specimen is the acronym: the PIN number, the ATM machine, the HIV virus, the LCD display. This has a name—RAS syndrome, for Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome—and the name is itself an example, which is the best joke in linguistics.
Turkish, which has no such anxieties
Turkish, by contrast, does not suffer from pleonasm. It enjoys it.
Where English is content with I have eaten, a Turk will specify: Yemek yedim, “I ate food.” Where we say he is writing, Turkish requires the writing to be mentioned: Yazı yazıyor, “he is writing writing.” Children cannot simply play; they play a game: oyun oynuyorlar. And if you do not say where somebody is entering or exiting, you must add “inwards” and “outwards” respectively: İçeri girip dışarı çıkıyor—“entering inwards and exiting outwards.”
English has the construction too—grammarians call it the cognate object—but keeps it for high days and holidays: to live a life, to dream a dream, to sing a song, to die a death. We reach for it when we want weight. Turkish reaches for it because that is simply how the sentence is built.
No Fowler of their own
And note that since Atatürk’s day there has been an entire institution at work on the language—first on the change to the Latin alphabet and on standardisation, and latterly on inventing neologisms out of Turkic roots so as to head off borrowings for new arrivals like the computer.
But pleonasms appear not to trouble the Turkish normativists in the least.
They simply never had a Fowler.
