Questions tagged [diminutive]
For questions about diminutives, i.e., special word forms that denote a smaller version of the original. Diminutives are most often derivations on nouns, but depending on the language other parts of speech can also form diminutives.
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Why does French use diminutive suffixes differently from other Romance languages?
I'm a native French speaker, and I noticed that for a lot of masculine objects, we use the suffix -ette to designate a smaller version of it, which turns it into a feminine word. Here are a few ...
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Is there a name for a diminutive whose meaning has decoupled from the original word?
In languages where the diminutive is productive (such as Slavic languages), many words derived as a diminutive have a meaning completely decoupled from their origin, and do not anymore "convey ...
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Similar diminutive name construction in Turkish and Armenian
In Armenian diminutive for personal names are formed by adding 'o' for some short part of the name (I'm intentionally not calling this short form "root" cause it's not necessarily a root), so some ...
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Origin of the term "iminutive"
The word "iminutive" is used in Yiddish, and, apparently, Bavarian grammar to refer to the second diminutive (i.e., of nouns).
The etymology of "diminutive" is clear. As for the provenance of the ...
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