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When, about 40 years ago, I first read the "Basic Annals of Xiang Yu (232-202 BC)" ( Xiàngyǔ běnjì 項羽本紀) in the The Scribe's Records (Shǐjì 史記, ca. 94), the foundation for the 24 official dynastic histories that followed it, I was struck by this sentence: `Yúshì Xiàng wáng dà hū chí xià, Hàn jūn jiē pīmí, suì zhǎn Hàn yī jiāng.'「於是項王大呼馳下，漢軍皆披靡，遂斬漢一將。」("Then King Xiang shouted loudly and galloped down, causing all of the Han army [to flee] pell-mell, whereupon he cut down one of the Han generals".)

What struck me so powerfully was that the Chinese term pīmí 披靡 sounded (Old Sinitic [Zhengzhang reconstruction] /*pʰralʔ/ /*mralʔ/) very similar to and meant exactly the same thing as our expression "pell-mell". I thought that surely there must be some connection between these two colorful expressions, one in Sinitic and one in European languages. The problem was that the two were separated by seventeen centuries and thousands of miles.

[French pêle-mêle, from Old French pesle mesle, probably reduplication of mesle, imperative of mesler, to mix; see meddle.]

[C16: from Old French pesle-mesle, jingle based on mesler to meddle]

[1570–80; < Middle French pelemele, Old French pesle mesle, rhyming compound based on mesler to mix. See meddle]

[All three etymologies from The Free Dictionary]

So I just set that uncanny resemblance aside and did nothing with it. But every time I read that passage from "Basic Annals of Xiang Yu" (I do it once a year with my students in First-year Literary Sinitic), I experience the same thrill of recognition. This year, however, since I had a bit of extra time on my hands over the Thanksgiving break, I decided to look into the pīmí 披靡 || pell-mell parallel a bit more closely.

The first question I asked is whether, since "pell-mell" sounds like a colloquial expression, it might have been overlooked in written texts before the 16th century. Don Ringe disabused me of that notion thus:

This is *exactly* the kind of thing *most* likely to arise by chance over and over. No, I doubt very much that it's older than that. There is a flood–and I do mean a flood, millions of words–of written English and French from the 14th century on (in French, from the 13th century on), and just about everything is recorded, including the most tabu words in both languages. The odds that something in the spoken language didn't get recorded are nil.

All right, but I still needed to find an explanation — at least for myself — how a disyllabic colloquial term in Sinitic from the 1st c. BC and a colloquial expression in French from the 16th c. AD could sound essentially the same and convey the same, highly specific idea.

I began to explore various avenues of inquiry and asked a number of colleagues how they would explain the origin and nature of "pell-mell".

Craig Melchert commented:

I frankly have no idea about this particular example, but there is no principled reason why it could not be much older. In addition to the problem you cite of such expressions often not appearing in the written record, there is the further tendency of historical linguists not to pursue the origins of such things. I attach one of the very last papers of Calvert Watkins (see towards the end on the "expressive" for pain/distress that appears in Hittite as a:i wa:i*), arguing that they should not be totally excluded from our purview. Of course, he could by that point in his career freely deal with such things–seniority does allow one more latitude. I am also reminded of the thorough discussion by Mark R. V. Southern in his dissertation (published in 1999 as "Indo-European s-mobile and its Regeneration in Germanic") of the expressive (usually deprecatory) zero-s(c)h- pattern–a real example eludes me, but something like "eh, mighty-shmighty". The repeated initial labial stops in p-ell m-ell are certainly not accidental.

[*VHM: Watkins mentions Yiddish "oy vey" in this context. Compare the last two paragraphs of this post, and this comment, where I discuss the elemental nature of "oh, woe [is me]".]

[VHM:

I will return to some of the points raised by Craig below. Especially striking is the deep Indo-European antiquity of words related to "woe" and phrases in the daughter languages derived from it. Watkins regrets that the *u̯ai vocable is regrettably absent from his American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. I have a pdf copy of Watkins' paper if anyone is interested in reading it:

"Aspects of the 'Expressive Dimension' in Indo-European: Toward a Comparative Grammar of Speech Registers". In Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert, and Brent Vine (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference (Bremen: Hempen, 2013), pp. 243–53.]

Bruce Brooks astutely remarked:

The p- has not been addressed. I recall George Kennedy’s comment (a propos Boodberg’s theory of dimidation in early Chinese) that we are not required to reconstruct *rpoly as the ancestor of roly-poly. One of the consonants in the reduplicative is likely to be secondary. In both this example and in pell-mell, I suspect it is the p-.

The device is at bottom playful, and the language of children, especially the abusive language of children, might perhaps with profit be observed, and considered. Such terms seem to be to some degree pejorative, even derogatory. As are diminutives generally.

There are also some apparently literary rhyming formulations that get into the language, eg willy-nilly. Ingenious adults also play, and must probably be considered. Nor is rhyme crucial: hunky-dory. What does seem to keep turning up is metrical, a 2+2 form (extended in higgledy-piggledy, but perhaps ancestrally present). Is the p- secondary here also, bringing in the additional idea of squalor? Or are the pigs etymological?

Many of these, at least the most familiar English ones, go back to poems, or even songs. Itsy-bitsy spider. Here I would suspect an etymological bit > bitsy (already made pejorative by the adding of the second syllable) plus deletion of the b- in the other element. the one which completes the metrical pattern.

Bruce closed his initial observations by quoting a line from a very old and very famous Chinese poem, the first in the Poetry Classic (Shījīng 詩經) (ca. 6th c. BC):

yǎotiǎo shūnǚ 窈窕淑女 ("a graceful and gentle maiden")

This speaks eloquently to Bruce's point — and there are many other comparable rhyming binoms in the Poetry Classic.

Chinese poetry and prose are replete with expressions of this sort. They are called by different names:

liánmián cí 聯綿詞 / 連綿詞 ("rhyming / alliterative binoms"): pípá 枇杷 ("loquat"), fǎngfú 彷彿 ("as if"), sèsuō 瑟縮 ("shrinking; cowering; curling up with cold")

diéyùn 疊韻 ("assonance"): xiāoyáo 逍遙 ("carefree; be at ease (leisure); be free and unfettered; wander about at leisure" — this is one of my favorite words from the Zhuang Zi), chángyáng 徜徉 ("stroll about unhurriedly"), pánhuán盤桓 ("linger")

The latter is considered by some authorities to be a type of the former.

There are thousands of Sinitic rhyming binoms of this sort. I have large dictionaries full of this type of expression. Note that modern Chinese grammarians refer to them as single, disyllabic words (cí 詞), not two separate characters (zì 字).

Bruce later added the following:

In my part of Ohio, anyone wanting to coin an instant denigrative can do it on the other person’s name, often with w- in the second element. Thus if one wanted to put down someone named Victor, one might simply address him as “Vicky-wicky.” Very difficult to answer in actual conversation. It expresses something, but makes no actual statement. In the culture of my childhood, males did this only to males, not to other females, and I do not recall observing an instance between females. It is something of an invitation to fight; that is, it looks to, or at least does not preclude, a nonlinguistic response.

As for antiquity, don’t leave out hocus-pocus, derived from the already mystical Latin formula “hoc est corpus,” and denigrative for magic in general.

Also the affective reduplicatives describing stance and manner in Analects 10, which belong to a somewhat different category.

Martin Schwartz: I can't say about the words at hand, but I do know of Iranian (Persian and Sogdian) and two-word rhyming phrases in which the second is a nonsense word in m-. Cf. similar but ad lib phrases in Yiddish where the rhyming nonsense-word has shm-…. Johanna, I seem to remember some relevant pair in Caucasic where the second (?) is mætæl….

Johanna Nichols: Martin, you have a great memory — it must be 30+ years ago since we discussed that word. Yes, "hetal-metal" is a word for 'riddle' I've found in Chechen. Neither word appears to be native to me (at least not the roots), so maybe it comes from Kumyk? There are quite a few Turkic loanwords in Chechen, Avar, and other lowland East Caucasian languages.

Jerry Friedman mentions the Yiddish dismissive "ready-shmeady" construction in this comment.

Cf. Mark R. V. Southern, Contagious Couplings: Transmission of Expressives in Yiddish Echo Phrases, ch. 1 ("Binomial Dismissive Pairs in Yiddish"), p. 13:

Binomial dismissive pairs are one of Yiddish's most successfully entrenched and connotatively colorful loans into mainstream English. Marked by their productive X- shm- labial-initial doublet pattern (a sort of "movable shm-"), they are highly expressive: derogatory, taboo-avoiding, or ironically playful. Each pair presents a tight, verbless sentential unit. These features transfer easily and productively into Yiddishized English: for example, messy, shmessy 'messy: who cares!'

Such words may fit into a larger pattern of crosslinguistic phrase formation. In this regard, Hiroshi Kumamoto refers to the well-established linguistic category of "echo-words":

First see Murray B. Emeneau's book Language and Linguistic Area (Stanford University Press, 1980), p. 9, where he talks about echo words with the second member beginning with m-.

I think Wilma Heston wrote about this kind of thing in "Some areal features: Indian or Irano-Indian", International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 9 (1980), 141–167.

For Thai, Jeffrey P. Williams, "A note on echo word morphology in Thai and the languages of South and South‐East Asia," Australian Journal of Linguistics, 11.1 (1991), 107-111.

For Persian, Don L. F. Nilsen, "Syntactic and Semantic Categories of Echo Words in Persian", Iranian Studies, 5.2-3 (Spring – Summer, 1972), 88-95.

For Ethiopic, Wolf Leslau. "Echo-Words in Ethiopic" in Annales d'Ethiopie, Volume 4, année 1961, pp. 205-238.

For Turkish, G. L. Lewis, Turkish Grammar (Oxford 1967), p. 237f, gives plenty of examples of what he calls "m-doublets" (with the second member with m-).

[VHM: I have pdfs of some of these articles]

Many words of this sort essentially convey the notion of "in a chaotic manner":

higgledy-piggeldy

late 16th century: rhyming jingle, probably with reference to the irregular herding together of pigs

helter-skelter

also late 16th c., perhaps from *skelt, Middle English skelten to hasten

Asko Parpola notes that such jingles exist in many languages: "In Finnish, for instance, you have the counterpart of pêle-mêle: mullin mallin. Another English example is the incantation used by conjurers, hocus-pocus [VHM: also mentioned by Bruce Brooks above], which probably goes back to the Latin words of the holy communion, hoc est corpus meum.

Peter Golden observes that allakbullak can render "pell-mell" in Turkish.

I describe the essential orality of such expressions as those discussed here in this post:

"Sayable but not writable" (9/12/13)

When all is said and done, I still cannot help but think that pīmí 披靡 (OS /*pʰralʔ/ /*mralʔ/) and "pell-mell" are related by something more than pure coincidence.

[Thanks to John Huehnergard, Chau Wu, Frank Southworth, and Abraham Chan]

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