random stuff about languages -23

[howsmyenglish]

Driving home today and listening to the song "Ay Nicaragua, Nicaraguita", I suddenly realized that not all languages have these "sweetening suffixes" like the "-ita" in Spanish. It actually was shocking. I first noticed, there was no "sweetening suffix" in Hindi and thought, "ooooh, what a pity", then I tried to find one in English... I'm sorry, did I not sleep enough? I could'n find one. In German, there is "-chen" and "-lein", in Russian, "-chka" and, maybe, "-chek". Czec is full of sweetening/softening suffixes, they have "-n'ka" in almost every third word. Hebrew has something of the sort: "pil" is an elephant and "pilon" is his child. But English? And how about other languages you know? Chinese? Welsh? Irish? Polish? etc? (Polish must have them, I'm sure of that at least!)

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Lette or ling might be used sometimes

So friends child is mouselet.

We use bach in Welsh meaning little

[howsmyenglish]

Right! -ling and -lette!
I'm glad there is something! :) Thanks!

[grayswandir]

Yes, it really is strange that English doesn't have better options for making cute/sweet/diminutive word forms. The only sweetening/softening suffix I can think of in English is "y"/"ie," but it has pretty limited usage -- mostly for just a few specific types of animals, like "kitty," "doggy," "birdie," "fishie." (I assume that this usage is related to the way English nicknames usually end in "y"/"ie": Bobby, Suzie, Joey, Tommy, Barbie. It might also be part of the reason why so many female names end in "y"/"ie" even in their full forms -- Stephanie, Nancy, etc. But I really don't know.)

[Edited to delete my comments about "-ling," since I see that angelofthenorth already mentioned it!]

Chinese uses 子 (tsi) or 仔 (tsai) as a softening suffix. Both characters mean "child." I think the first one is more common in Mandarin, but in Cantonese I mostly hear the second one. Adding tsai as a suffix at the end of a person's given name turns the name into a diminutive form (so the difference between calling somebody Wai vs. Wai Tsai is kind of like the difference between "Bill" and "Billy").

You can also add tsai to animal words (gwai is "turtle," gwai tsai makes it a cute little turtle) and some inanimate objects (gim is "sword," gim tsai is "dagger"). It's also part of some common words for people (e.g. haak means "guest"; haak tsai means "customer"). And it seems to be quite common to compliment men of any age by calling them leng tsai (literally "handsome boy").

[howsmyenglish]

I thought about -y and -ie, too, but, just like you, didn't find a broad range of possible usages. For me, the perfect softening suffix is one you can attach to almost every word... :)
I like the Chinese examples!

[grayswandir]

I just followed aim_of_destiny's Wikipedia link and scrolled down to the section on Chinese to see what else it would say about Chinese diminutives. Looks like Mandarin does things a bit differently from Cantonese, but anyway, I was highly entertained to find that Andy Lau's name is used as the example in both the Mandarin and the Cantonese sections. XD I purposely avoided using him as the example in my own comment, but apparently there's no escape...

[marahmarie]

Eh, I think "ie" and "y" when pronounced the same at the end of a word as "ie" is are probably the closet English gets to that.

[aim_of_destiny]

those are called diminutives! english actually has a whole bunch of them (many of which were filched from other languages, as usual), so here's a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diminutives_by_language

[howsmyenglish]

(I'm going through all the messages I never replied to, sorry for being so late!)

Thank you for the link and the term! I should have remembered it.

I still say it's a pity that "Productive diminutives are infrequent to nonexistent in Standard English", but it's totally interesting to see all the "endings that could be seen as diminutives", it adds to my understanding of English immensely :D

[aim_of_destiny]

it's all good, i'm not especially bothered about timely replies ;)

imo english is, in this case as with many other things, simultaneously very similar to other languages and very different, simply because it swipes bits and pieces from other languages and fossilizes them in place to confuse future learners.