832: Diminutives, puddle and yankee Mar 18, 2017

Diminutives, to put it simply, imply smallness of a word; in some languages like Dutch, Spanish, and Italian these often appear as suffixes whereas in English people tend to use adjectives like, 'little'. In English, however, there is sometimes a trace of lingering diminutive suffixes, such as the '-le' in 'puddle'. In Old English 'pudd' meant 'ditch' and is related to other words meaning 'pool'. You can see more on these other words like 'chicken here. Today, the closest any English suffix may come to being a universal diminutive is perhaps '-y', but this is mostly non-standard and often only informal. As mentioned before however, Dutch has plenty, and words adopted into English occasionally carry this which you can read more on here. The American baseball team, the Yankees, comes from the nickname 'Janke', which is a diminutive of 'Jan' (‘John’). In Spanish, this would typically be done with '-ito' such as in the nickname, 'Carlito' sometimes, though not always, indicating that the father has the same name, which in English would be denoted with the title, Jr.