Diminutive Suffixes

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Scott Rickard calling from Billings, Montana.

Hi, Scott, welcome.

What’s up, buddy?

My question is, I don’t know if Grant’s ever experienced this, but what is it with people adding an E sound to the end of a person’s first name? Like, particularly, you hear it when someone’s talking about or to a child, or it’s a family member, or when you differentiate between two family members or relatives that share the first name, they’ll say, no, not Don, but Donnie.

Right.

Where does that come from? And to me, it just gets a little more interesting when people do that to an adult. Because what does this mean? Does this mean the speaker considers this person a friend or useful or, you know, is it harmless? Or in some cases, is this even a compliment?

Oh, that’s a good question. This is a really good question. There’s a lot to talk about this. So your name is?

God.

And do people call you?

Yes.

Do you like it?

You know, it’s all right. You know, I’ve just learned there’s far worse things to be called.

You don’t want to be called Scotty.

Don’t ever call me Marty.

Marty, no.

But we call you Martita off the air, right?

Well, Martita, yeah, that works.

But that’s the Spanish suffix, right?

Yeah, but Scott, if we called you Scotty, you wouldn’t be happy is what you’re saying.

No, it’s not the best thing. And I have had it, Scott. People, my grandmother, when I was a boy, called me, my middle name is Andrew. She called me Grant Andy. And it’s kind of a way of doing it.

Oh, that’s cute.

But Granty doesn’t really work. It sounds too much like granny, and believe me, I heard that. But granny is another one of those. Grandmother to grandma to granny, right?

So we’ve got this set of suffixes in English, and there are a lot of them. Some of them are more common than others. And they’re called many things, but hypochoristic suffixes is the best word.

Hypochoristic.

Hypocorisms, you might call them for nouns. Also called diminutive suffixes, where when you affix these to the end of the word, you change the meaning. I mean, this is what we do with any kind of suffix or any kind of prefix or any kind of infix. They modify what they’re connected to. And we have in English two or three, depending which source you check, let’s just call them three, three hyperchoristic suffixes, which when attached to a noun or a proper noun, change it to mean smaller, cuter, less, sweeter, simpler.

And that’s what you get when you have a big Don and little Don or big Don and Donny. Donny means small Don or little Don or it means the lesser of the two Dons, you know.

So we’ve got one root which comes from Old English and another one which appeared in Scots and might be connected to Dutch and then another one which probably comes from French. And all three of these suffixes, one way or the other mean small, cute, simple, tiny, adorable, maybe even. And cute has an interesting kind of connection there because it could, in the old days, it meant small as often as it meant like sweet and attractive.

So that’s what’s happening here. And this is just normal, everyday English. This is the morphology of English. We take a root, we add prefixes and suffixes, and voila, we’ve got another word to work with.

So, Scott, what do you do when that happens?

I just let it pass. When I was younger, it bothered me more. But, you know, you just let it fly. You know, what you could do, and there’s kind of a joking reverse trend to this, and it’s not that common, but you can take and add masculine-sounding suffixes. Like it could be, no, no, don’t call me Scotty. Call me Scotland or whatever, right? There’s something else that sounds a little stronger and bolder than Scotty. I mean, if you’re going to nickname me, give me something aggressive.

Scotmaster.

I’m sure I’m going to hear all of these in the next few weeks.

Yeah, why not, right?

But I hope we helped Scott.

You did. Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure. Take care now.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

All right. Take care.

What are the sweet names that you use in your house? What do people call you that you don’t want to be called? What would you rather be called?

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