Everything about Shm-reduplication totally explained
Shm-reduplication is a form of
reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable (the
base) is repeated with the copy (the
reduplicant) beginning with
shm-, IPA [ʃm]. The construction is generally used to indicate irony, derision or scepticism with respect to comments about the discussed object::He's just a baby!
» Baby-shmaby. He's already 5 years old!
A classic example of shm-reduplication is "Latin schmatin", a slang phrase for
binomial nomenclature.
Phonological properties
- Words beginning with a single consonant typically replace that consonant with shm- (table shmable).
- Words beginning with a consonant cluster are more variable: some speakers replace only the first consonant if possible (breakfast shmreakfast), others replace the entire cluster (breakfast shmeakfast).
- Vowel-initial words append the shm- directly to the beginning of the reduplicant (apple shmapple).
- Some speakers target the stressed syllable rather than the first syllable (incredible inshmedible); a subset of these don't copy base material preceding the stressed syllable (incredible shmedible; cf. Spitzer 1952).
- Shm-reduplication is generally avoided or altered with words that already begin with shm-; for instance, schmuck doesn't yield the expected *schmuck schmuck, but rather total avoidance or mutation of the shm- (giving forms like schmuck shluck, schmuck fluck, and so on).
- Many speakers use sm- instead of shm- with words that contain a sh (Ashmont Smashmont, not *shmashmont).
Further phonological details revealed by Bert Vaux and Andrew Nevins' online survey of shm-reduplication can be found here (External Link
).
Origins and sociolinguistic distribution
The construction appears to have originated in
Yiddish and was subsequently transferred to
English, especially urban northeastern
American English, by Yiddish speaking Jews. It is now known and used by many non-Jewish English speakers. The construction also transferred into modern
Hebrew usage, as in
David Ben Gurion's famous dismissal of the UN - "Oum Shmoum" ("
U.N. Shmu-N") - during a
March 29 1955 government meeting.
Bibliography
Feinsilver, Lillian. 1961. On Yiddish Shm-. American Speech 36: 302-3.
Nevins, Andrew; and Vaux, Bert. 2003. Metalinguistic, shmetalinguistic: The phonology of shm-reduplication. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society annual meeting, April 2003.
Southern, Mark. 2005. Contagious Couplings: Transmission of Expressives in Yiddish Echo Phrases. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Spitzer, Leo. 1952. Confusion shmooshun. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51: 226-33.Further Information
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