I just saw this strip of The far side, where a duck says how its wife just say “quack quack quack” in the morning and “quack quack quack” in the night, instead of “blah blah blah”.
I just saw this strip of The far side, where a duck says how its wife just say “quack quack quack” in the morning and “quack quack quack” in the night, instead of “blah blah blah”.
It’s more likely cognate with the word “patter”, or at the very least, a parallel development from the same underlying onomatopoeia. Nothing to do with spuds.
The emphasis is on the last syllable of each, “e-pata-TI, e-pata-TA”.