The world is a vast and often unmanageable place - so no wonder if we sometimes display
a powerful attraction to the idea of miniaturisation. We seem to love dollhouses, teddies, train
sets, bonzai trees, model airplanes and tiny cups and saucers sitting on the sides of miniaturized
kitchens.
These please us by symbolising a taming and humanising of the gigantic dimensions of much
of life. By far the easiest and fastest way to miniaturise
the world is not by making models of it, but through the use of what linguists call:
DIMINUTIVES A diminutive is a word that has been modified
to suggest the smaller version of itself - usually through a tweak to its ending.
Interestingly, the moment we’re tempted to use a diminutive is often the moment we
start to love someone or something. The more we feel drawn, the more we want to possess
them, to tame their otherness and intimidating scale, and therefore to shrink them down to
something more manageable, something that might slip into our pocket.
When a couple, let’s call them Emma and Brad get together, they might swiftly add
some diminutives to their burgeoning relationship. His vagabond footloose sides can be tamed
by a little y, so that he becomes Brad-y. And Emma might shrink by being called Emm-ie.
It’s particularly interesting to find that not all languages use diminutives to the same
extent. The champion is Spanish, especially as spoken in Latin America. Latin Americans
are constantly trying to shrink everything. In Mexico “ahora” (in a minute) becomes
“ahorita”, in just a little second. “Un poco”, a little, gets changed in “un poquitín”,
just a smidgeon. A coffee, “un café”, is constantly changed into “un cafelín”
or “un cafelito.” That doesn’t make your coffee any smaller, but it brings you
into a more intimate relationship to it. Italian is another language very keen on diminutives,
usually with the addition of an “ino” or “ina”.
An old man: in Italian un vecchio becomes un vecchietto
A little boy ragazzo → ragazzino A woman (donna → donnetta)
A small car (macchina → macchinetta) German, often seen as a formal, harsh language, also
has a flair for diminutives. The suffixes “-chen”, “-lein” can be added to many
words. A sausage, “ein Wurst”, can be turned into “ein Würstchen”, which isn’t
necessarily a smaller sausage but one that is particularly irresistible. Likewise “ein
Hündchen” isn’t necessarily a smaller dog than “ein Hund” but it’s probably
one you have a soft spot for. The major language notable for its lack of diminutives is English:
at best, we can add a “-y” or a ‘let’, very poor moves compared the great richness
of diminutives in other languages. We might wonder why this is. Perhaps English, the global
language, the language of conquest and Empire, resists the accommodation with the modest,
the everyday and the tender which other languages pave the way for. We may lack diminutives
because it is that little bit harder to be tender in English - or, more importantly,
as an English person. Diminutives do the valuable job of rehabilitating
sweetness. They remind us that we have come from childhood and that when we love, we want
to shrink the world back down to a more manageable and loveable scale. We know that we are the
objects of someone’s affection when they start to shrink us down - and we shouldn’t
hesitate to shrink down the bits of the world we have begun to care for. This has been a
message from what the germans might term The School of Life-lein (german) or the Italians
The School of Life-etta.
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