Reduplication is a linguistic phenomenon so basic that it is found throughout the world, except in Europe. When, therefore, the Europeans spread across the world in conquest, encountering new languages which possessed this feature and triggering the creation of new languages which used this basic tool of communication, they scorned it; but this disdain required willful blindness on the part of the more educated Europeans to the existence of partial reduplication in one language that they elevated above all others: Greek. In some instances, where the ravages of time and the desperation of analogical repair had worn away the surface pattern, this blindness could be forgiven; in many cases, however, the reduplication was a clear and present feature. The history of the Indo-European languages in Europe was, in part, a process of systematically removing this reduplication, but in Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin, it still remained, and those were tongues which the elites of Europe held in reverence. In Latin reduplication remained only in the perfect tense as an increasingly archaic and non-productive feature; in Greek, however, reduplication was the principal method by which the perfect was created, while reduplication in the present was non-productive. Since the fact of reduplication indicates a primary segment from which the reduplicated segment is taken, the reduplicated segment is almost always simplified, although the details of that simplification varies according to the language. If the simplification of European languages had been a laudable quality, the European point of view might have been consistent, but it was the complexity of Latin and Greek that was admired. Thus, logically, the complexity of foreign tongues should have been admired instead of suffering disdain.
The more change-oriented among my readers may see a lesson in this; I merely offer it as an observation.
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