{"id":681642,"date":"2010-03-03T10:54:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T15:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2155"},"modified":"2026-10-04T11:08:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T15:08:53","slug":"where-is-gaggig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/681642","title":{"rendered":"Where is *gaggig?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My preliminary experiments with dictionary searching suggest that English has absolutely no words with roots of forms like *<I>bobbib<\/I>, *<I>papoop<\/I>, *<I>tettit<\/I>, *<I>doded<\/I>, *<I>keckick<\/I>, *<I>gaggig<\/I>, *<I>mimmom<\/I>, *<I>naneen<\/I>, *<I>faffiff<\/I>, *<I>sussis<\/I>, etc.  These are simple CVCVC shapes that do not seem to contain any un-English sequence.  They aren&#8217;t hard to say.  In fact there is an example of a verb with the shape <I>d<\/I>V<I>d<\/I> that has a regular preterite tense: <I>deed<\/I> has the preterite <I>deeded<\/I> (as in <I>The farmer deeded back his farm to the bank<\/I> [<I>WSJ<\/I> w7_016]). But the pronounceability of <I>deeded<\/I> only makes the puzzle more acute: why are there no <B>roots<\/B> with the phonological form C<SUB><I>i<\/I><\/SUB>VC<SUB><I>i<\/I><\/SUB>VC<SUB><I>i<\/I><\/SUB> (where C<SUB><I>i<\/I><\/SUB> is some specific consononant sounds and the V positions are filled with vowel sounds).  Why?  Or is the generalization perhaps wrong?  Have I missed some words of the shape in question?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My preliminary experiments with dictionary searching suggest that English has absolutely no words with roots of forms like *bobbib, *papoop, *tettit, *doded, *keckick, *gaggig, *mimmom, *naneen, *faffiff, *sussis, etc. These are simple CVCVC shapes that do not seem to contain any un-English sequence. They aren&#8217;t hard to say. In fact there is an example of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2633,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-681642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2Rke","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782594,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681642\/revisions\/782594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}