Reduplicationatration

There is an interesting semi-productive phenomena that is occuring in a house belonging to somebody I know. To demonstrate the unusual size of an object, you take the objects name, add a schwa to the end of it, then repeate the last syllable of the original word, with tr as the onset sound. The two things I observed were the remotatrote and the bongatrong.

The labelling is largely ornamental, nobody uses the terms to distinguish between two objects, and the larger ones are not always referred to with the reduplicated name. Nonetheless, I still think that it is a curious development. I would be interested to see how outsiders would interpret a word such as remoteatrote were they asked to produce a definition, or even to see what people might do if they were given the situation where they had to change elements of the word remote to signify a larger remote, but the final result must also be one word.