Doubly unnecessary

Idon’t know when you last went punting on the Avon River, but whenever it was, I’d be surprised if you spent much time wondering about the name the Avon River.

Avon is a Celtic word meaning `river’, going back to the days before the forerunner of English was spoken in England; you can see the Welsh cognate in

Afon Dyfrdwy `the river Dee’. The Avon River is thus something of a tautology, historically speaking. It means `the river river’.

This is certainly not the only example where we have a loan word and an English word which means the same, side by side. Consider Lake Rotoiti. Rotoiti means `small lake’ so Lake Rotoiti means

`lake small lake’. Mount Maunganui is similar: Maunganui means `big mountain’ so Mount Maunganui means

`mountain big mountain’.

The phenomenon is so common that Wikipedia has pages of examples, including the Hatchie River in the southern US, Yallock Creek in Victoria, Laguna Lake in California or the

Philippines, Lake Michigan (`big lake lake’), Knockhill in the Scottish lowlands, Penhill in Yorkshire or Somerset, Kodiak Island in Alaska, the La Brea Tar Pits

(`the the tar tar pits’) in California, and so on.

We have other ways of creating tautological names. For those who remember the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the US and the USSR in the 1970s, the label SALT talks will also be familiar, although that really means `Strategic Arms Limitation Talks talks’. On a similar pattern think of ATM machine, Covid virus, GPS system, PIN number and RAT test.

More overt examples include a free gift (aren’t gifts free by definition?) an oak tree (isn’t every oak a tree?), to join together (if you join things, aren’t they automatically together?), to enter into (doesn’t enter imply into?), an

unconfirmed rumour (if it’s confirmed, it is surely no longer just a rumour?) where the duplication is not hidden by another language or the use of a single letter abbreviation.

This material is not really a surprise, I suppose. To quote Yogi Berra, ``It’s de´ ja` vu all over again’’.

Double negatives, like He didn’t do nothing, and double comparatives, like It’s

a more bigger question, have been argued to be tautological, but that is a matter of perspective: for speakers who use these constructions the repetition may be obligatory, and when it is obligatory it makes more sense to talk about redundancy than tautology.

Various people have calculated that language is approximately 50% redundant. This is a useful feature, because it means that we can understand spoken language against background noise, understand a written text that includes spelling mistakes, and cope with language errors or just confused grammar when we meet it. Y cn prbbly ndrstnd ths wtht vwl lttrs, but the vowels make it easier to process. The difference in speech between why

choose and white shoes is signalled by minute differences in the [t] sound, which allows us to hear where words begin and end. In I washed the car yesterday the

yesterday does away with the need for -ed on washed, but the suffix helps us keep the information straight. Saying things twice is not necessarily bad, but too much of it can be a problem.

As a postscript, note that while it may be the Avon River in Christchurch, in Stratford it is the River Avon. The British usage is conservative; American usage is like the New Zealand usage.

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