“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes (2015)

Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by edzillion on Sunday December 11, 2022 @06:32AM (#33942316)

There is also another interesting unwritten rule of the English language at play here. The rule goes like this:

In a series of words which differ only (or mostly) by the vowel used, the order should be e, i, a, o

- tic tac toe

- flim flam

- ding dong

- king kong

If you doubt it, try saying the opposite and hear how odd it sounds: The clock went 'Tock Tick'

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by Anon4Now on Sunday December 11, 2022 @07:45AM (#33942684)

Bingo bango bongo, I never noticed that. I tried saying 'fee fi fo fum' backwards and it took me about 10 times to get it right. There's almost a musical cadence to the usual order that just sounds off key when said backwards.

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by rippercushions on Sunday December 11, 2022 @08:33AM (#33943002)

This is language-dependent. The Japanese syllabary is sorted in the order a-i-u-e-o, which is weird to the Western ear, but as ubiquitous as A-B-C in Japan.

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by doomrobo on Sunday December 11, 2022 @11:09AM (#33944374)

Yup! It's called ablaut. English has ablaut reduplication for children's words like kitty-cat or sing-song

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by jihadjihad on Sunday December 11, 2022 @09:30AM (#33943504)

It's probably not unwritten. It's similar to how we conjugate irregular verbs like "sing/ring" or "beget". The topic in linguistics is called vowel gradation [0].

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by SoftTalker on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:25PM (#33946528)

Bada bing a counter example?

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by JustLurking2022 on Sunday December 11, 2022 @03:15PM (#33946996)

Not really, unlike the other examples the words differ by more than just the vowel sound.

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Re:“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of coun... by russdill on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:48PM (#33946769)

I think the a sound in ba and da just isn't included in the list.

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