Romance Languages

To use a ain example, a friend of mine whose first language is French has named her arouseary Jaunette - which seems at first as if it should mean " slim Yellow Thing" but in fact heart and soul (to the woman) something like "the yellowest thing that I've ever seen). In this sense, the petite seems to dish as a way of stripping away former(a) attributes of the fair game represented by the word that has taken the flyspeck. (Lloyd 41).

In entirely of the dawdle languages, diminutives serve two separate functions: They can refer either to something that is literally smaller than other objects with which it is associated, or it can be used to indicate that the speaker feels fondness or special regard for the person or object that is designated with a diminutive. Quite a lot (as with children or pets), the diminutive simultaneously signals both relative smallness and affection (Harris and Vincent 82).

In general, Romance languages (following the basis in Latin of the diminutive stops ula and ulus) allow for nouns exclusively to take the diminutive endings, for example ette and et in French; ita and ito in Spanish; ino and ina in Italian; ula and ulo in Romanian. The addition of this ending is usually accomplished by dropping the final vowel sound (if any) of the noun and in many cases shifting the

stress of the word so that it conforms to other words of the very(prenominal) number of syllables as the diminutive form of the word. Not infrequently a letter has to be added to ensure that word keeps a pronunciation similar in the diminutive to its pronunciation in the nail down form: the inclusion of the "h" in 'spaghetti" (for example) ensures that the "g" will remain hard rather than shifting to a soft "g" (as would be the case if the letter were followed by an "e").

Following are some examples of unmarked and diminutive forms in Italian: ragazzo = boy, ragazzino = small boy; pasticcio = pie, pasticcino = tartlet; salata = salt, salatino = salty sharpness; -etto: povero = poor, poveretto tu! = poor you; sarchio = showel, sarchiello = small showel; rondine = swallow, rondinotto = swallow nestling (http://www.unilang2.org/wiki2/wiki.phtml?title=Italian_diminutives&PHPSESSID=e36a7bf1d3174b14c6e651a7a05e16').

In at least some cases, the diminutive takes on a meaning that is sufficiently decided from the original (i.e. aggrandized) meaning of the root word that it might arguably be seen as no longer being a diminutive of that word at all but as having exit an entirely distinct word. We see an example of this with the Italian word spaghetti (which has, of course, also become a word in other languages). The word "spaghetti" is the diminutive (plural) of the word which is a diminutive of "spago", which means twine or string. The word for one of the most popular foods with American schoolchildren gum olibanum means something like stringlets. But because the word "spaghetti" (which, interestingly, tends to be treat as a singular in English because English speakers do not understand the derivation of the suffix) is in all likelihood used at least as often a
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