1397: Hypocorisms Oct 8, 2018

On this blog, there's been a great deal of discussion about diminutives, but these are usually historical, from other languages, only able to be applied to certain words, or all of the above. However, hypocorisms as they are called can be far more flexible. The term includes diminutive affixes like '-ling' in 'duckling' but also other alternate forms of words such as nicknames. For instance '-ie' or '-y' to the given name 'Rose' to make it 'Rosie' isn't exactly diminutive, and this is especially the case when names are reduced first, such as 'Jonathan' to 'John' to 'Jonny'. However, while these aren't proper diminutive suffixes, they are far more productive—i.e. they can be added to more words—than is the case for any other diminutive suffix in English at the moment.

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