1045: -ling Oct 19, 2017

English has many affixes, but it also has number that are only slightly productive like '-th', or not at all like 'con-', but because the sample of words that can take those affixes is rather limited, looking at historical examples still offer a great deal of insight. For instance, the suffix '-ling' as in 'duckling' is diminutive, and can still be added to words like 'deerling' as an alternative to 'faun', but it goes back to Old English, and many words that took that suffix once have changed once it was affixed. 'Gosling' and 'darling' now no longer entirely resemble their respective stems, 'goose' and 'dear', however 'yearling' and 'youngling' do, and they do not have the meanings of "a young year" nor "a young young person (youth)". This is because the suffix was not originally diminutive but is believed to have come from a modification of '-ing' denoting origin, as in 'farthing', a coin which denoted a fourth (of a cent) and which led to words like 'duckling' or 'bearling', but also people, as in 'atheling', a word for Anglo-Saxon princes, which led to 'youngling', 'madling' etc. In this way, while there are only a few dozen words that have '-ling', many of which could be considered unacceptable today, we can still see the effect that it has had on English.