The English language has never shied away from borrowing foreign words. It has adopted or adapted words from other tongues with great enthusiasm, with more than 350 languages now represented in English. This borrowing process, however, can result in some peculiar linguistic side effects, one of which is the use of word combinations that say the same thing twice — but in different languages — creating what we could call a bilingual tautology (a tautology being “needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word”).
Here are some examples of common linguistic redundancies that have developed as a result of English’s multicultural roots. Many of these redundancies have become so embedded in everyday speech that we don’t even realize we’re repeating ourselves.
One classic example of a bilingual redundancy is the River Avon in the United Kingdom. “Avon” comes from a Celtic word meaning “river,” so the River Avon is essentially a tautology meaning “River River.” Another U.K.-based example of loanword adoption is the village of Torpenhow in Cumbria. The village name can be parsed out as a combination of the Saxon word tor, the Celtic pen, and the Old Norse how, all of which mean “hill” — meaning that Torpenhow translates as “Hill-hill-hill.”
In Arabic, the Sahara is called Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Kubrā, meaning “the Great Desert.” The Anglicized name of the desert derives from the Arabic word ṣaḥrāʾ, which simply means “desert.” So, when we refer to the Sahara Desert, we are in fact saying “Desert Desert.”
The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are among of the world’s most famous locations for fossil discoveries. They also happen to be a common example of linguistic redundancy. In Spanish, “la brea” means “the tar,” so when we say “La Brea Tar Pits,” we are actually saying “the Tar Tar Pits.”
The magnificent Lake Tahoe straddles the border between California and Nevada. The lake and its surrounding area have long been home to the Washoe people, a Great Basin tribe of Indigenous Americans. Lake Tahoe was naturally important to the Washoe, who named it da ow ga (or da’aw), a term literally meaning “the lake.” European settlers mispronounced this as “Tahoe,” and in turn named the large body of fresh water Lake Tahoe — likely unaware that they were essentially saying “Lake Lake.”
The word “Mississippi” comes from the Indigenous Ojibwe word mshi-ziibi, meaning “big river.” So, when we talk about the Mississippi River, we are saying “Big River River.” The Mekong River in Southeast Asia is a similar tautological example; in Thai, me means “mother” and khong means “river,” leaving us with “Mother River River.”
The culinary world is home to many tautologies that have arisen when English borrows words from other languages; naan bread is a prime example. The Urdu word nān translates as “bread,” so when we say “naan bread,” we are saying “bread bread.” As many viewers pointed out during a 2018 episode of The Great British Bake Off, saying “naan” on its own is enough.
Around the world, people tend to use variations of one of two words for tea. In English we say “tea,” while the French say thé, the Spanish té, and the Dutch thee. The other variation has a slightly different sound: chá in Mandarin and Cantonese, chai in Hindi, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian. So-called chai tea —a black tea of Indian origin, often spiced with cinnamon or cardamom — has become popular in the United States. But in India, chai is not a flavor of tea; it refers to tea in general. Saying “chai tea” is redundant, as it means “tea tea.”
If you fill your garden pond with “koi carp,” you are engaging in an aquatic tautology. “Koi” is the Japanese word for “carp,” making the “carp” in “koi carp” redundant.
Another commonly cited fish-related tautology is “ahi tuna,” which derives from the Hawaiian word ʻahi, referring to tuna, especially the yellow-fin tuna. In this respect, the “tuna” in “ahi tuna” is redundant. But there is a caveat: ʻAhi also means “fire” in Hawaiian, and Hawaiian fishermen used the word to refer to tuna because these powerful fish could pull on lines with such speed and strength that smoke would arise at the point where the fisherman’s line met the side of his boat. So, while “ahi tuna” can be considered a tautology — “tuna tuna” — there’s also a case to be made for “fire tuna.”
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