Talk:Agga

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Latest comment: 5 years ago by Lingo Bingo Dingo
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@Mnemosientje Isn't this a borrowing from Sranan Tongo Aga? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 08:53, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Lingo Bingo Dingo I wasn't aware of the Sranan term, but if that is indeed the attested form then it would seem likely yes as there are quite a lot of Surinamers there. (Is Roffa also from Sranan? It seems like it was formed similarly. Nimma (Nijmegen) may be related too, perhaps as a parody of Agga/Roffa.) — Mnemosientje (t · c) 10:34, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
I don't know whether Roffa is from Sranan, but I am sceptical. Haag > Haga > Aga > Agga would be a straightforward development, but t > f seems rather strange. One unreliable site says it is a Sranan Tongo word for "tough", but the word is apparently ròf, which seems a recent borrowing from English, so it would have to be supplemented with a suffix -a. But imo the derivation from "tough" reeks of armchair etymology all around and there is nothing compelling about it.
It would be interesting to check in what community it first became current, unfortunately Delpher, DBNL and Usenet are of no use. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 11:01, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps it'd be better to leave Roffa and Nimma be for now then, but you could add the Sranan origin idea to the ety here. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 11:08, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Mnemosientje Done. Could you perhaps add an IPA transcription? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 11:33, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Lingo Bingo Dingo Also done, though I keep thinking that our templates might need to be able to handle short /a/, because this definitely isn't pronounced like the aa in haar, for example. Also I just thought about it some more and I realized that I mentally kept reading this as if the <g> is pronounced /ɣ/ instead of /g/, but it is in fact /g/, which suggests that your loanword etymology is probably correct (and probably should be the first listed, or even the only one listed). — Mnemosientje (t · c) 12:23, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Mnemosientje That's funny, I wondered just before how the Sranan Tongo would be pronounced, regular with /ɡ/ or differently because it was a loanword. As for the a, isn't short /a/ just a common Hollandic realisation of /aː/ (which doesn't occur before codal /r/)? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 12:32, 12 February 2019 (UTC)Reply