0. Introductory notes

Among the many types of reduplication in the Tkc. languages, at least four are essentially a reduplication of the first syllable. One of them, the reduplication of the first syllable with an appended closing consonant, vastly outnumbers the others. It also appears to be the type usually meant when using the term first syllable reduplication in everyday speech. (Cf. 2.1.) In general, the phenomenon is poorly investigated. In particular, there does not seem to be any works devoted to its manifestation in Kar.

I decided to split the material presented here into two groups: 1. Reduplication with a closing consonant (1.1. Material, and 1.2. The closing consonant issue), and 2. other reduplications of the first syllable, i.e. taking into account the number of examples, Special cases (2.1. Actual first syllable reduplication; 2.2. Reduplication with an inserted vowel; 2.3. Reduplication with -ma- / -ta-, and 2.4. Apparent reduplications).

Notes on the presentation of the material:

– When reading the literature on Kar., one finds it difficult to escape the impression that introducing a new transcription every now and then seems to be considered good practice in the millieu of researchers in Kar. I have chosen to follow this tradition. I will use a mostly phonological notation which treats each dialect separately.