In Swedish it is common to add definite articles to foreign words or names, e.g. "Louvren" and "Towern" (Tower of London). Amusingly, these "Swedish words" are often believed to be the original word, and hence used in English: "Excuse me, where is Towern?" or "Then we went to see Louvren.". Examples can be seen by googling for the lines

went to see louvren -louvre

or

went to see towern -tower

Nice to meet someone from Sweden.Your examples form a nice up-to-date illustration of how those build in redundancies can become fixed.

Welcome to the Board, Isak. Your example also illustrates another interesting feature of Swedish (as well of Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian): post-fixed definite articles. Amongst Indo-European languages, a similar grammatical feature occurs in the Balkan language area (or Sprachbund). Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, and some others. While the Scandinavian languages all have a close genetic relationship, i.e., Old Norse, the Balkan languages come from three different language groups, i.e., Albanian, Romance, and Slavic, and their common ancestor (Proto-Indo-European) is more remote in time.

I read your Google items. I love the sound of Swedish. And the partial readability for Dutchies. Plus the movies coming from your country. What else ?

Your points about language are interesting..

Knitters are always commenting on how knitting styles from south eastern europe (from turkey, and eastern european countries) moved up north (via river trade routes) to Norse/swedes/scandinavian countries before moving to north west europe (netherlands) and then to british isles.

Turkish knitting is filled with multi color designs..
in scandianavia, a few of these designs predominate.
in (true) fair isle knitting, the selection of patterns is an even a smaller sub set

--and while fair isle knitting (stictly traditional fair isle) is colorful, it is also strictly limited to using only 2 colors of yarn in any one row.

turkish (and other south east european) knitting traditions often have fewer colors in total, but are more likely to incorporate 3 or more colors in a single row!

North Country mittens (from scandinavia all the way to latvia) tend to mirror the shape of turkish socks..)

but most socks in scandinavia tend to be the european style(from cuff to toe, with europen style heel)--not the turkish style-(toe to cuff, with a turkish heel.)

bits and pieces of style remained intact, (Post fixing definite articles/color patterns) but other pieces (basic language vocabulary/basic styles of knitting) are very different!

One can see relationships, but... there are still many differences.

knitting is just a technology.. and seeing how the technology traveled and how different grammatical features did too, is fascinating.. (it's pretty cool too, they tend to re-enforce each other!)

I'm reminded of that most common of redundancies, "the hoi polloi," or "the the many." Ironic.
At the ATM machine, we use our PIN number. We contact the CDC center if we get the HIV virus.
I wonder if it's more the pleasing aural rhythm than anything semantic that's at the root of these patterns? Kind of like a lot of tautologies: "to advocate for," rather than simply "to advocate"?

Cheers

Languages are full of redundancies. It assures that the message gets through over noisy channels. For instance, nobody complains about three books, where the plural marker is redundant, or that book over there.

Then there are redundancies that are not pleonastic since they carry information that would not be there without the redundancy. Anu mentioned AC current, which might be thought of as redundant because the C stands for current, but without specifying current you could be talking about AC voltage. PIN number is another example since there are possible contexts in which it might not be clear if you really meant that little sharp pointy thing, or even, in some dialects, a writing implement.

>PIN number is another example since there are possible contexts in which it might not be clear if you really meant that little sharp pointy thing..

sure. you're in the bank, having finally reached the front of a long line, and the teller says, "Enter your PIN now, please," so you jab 'er.

-ron o.

aw, quit needling him, ron.

"Enter your PIN now, please," So why would that make a person suddenly talkative?

Or either you have just gotten your bank card and you have to activate it in the bank's card reader. The bank employee then says, "Now select a PIN." and you look about for the pen they want you to use to sign the card.

To the Towern you! Special cells for agressive Pinners.

else they ask for your PIN number and you've got a pen to hand and you frantically search for the PIN* everywhere on its surface.

*Pen Identification Number

-joe (pardon my reduncity) friday

http://www.twainquotes.com/Lagniappe.html

Ta, metadata
I do like quoting him tho' never the Twain I shall meet.

Here in New Orleans (which is where the word is most often used, BTW), we have a weekly entertainment tabloid in the Times-Picayune each Friday by the same name.

Ooh, ooh--Cajundweeb (welcome aBoard, by the way), is your paper where we got the word picayunish? (sp?)

picayunish

English picayune is from the Louisiana Regional French (aka Cajun (Acadian) French) picaillon 'a small coin'. It was a half of a Spanish real and, in turn, was a 16th of a Spanish dollar: half a bit or five cents (really US$0.065).

and Times-Picayune probly was originally meant to reflect the price of the paper, and not the value of its content(s)!

-ron o.