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  • 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 were 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 Mexicoahora” (in a minute) becomes

  • ahorita”, in just a little second. “Un poco”, a little, gets changed inun poquitín”,

  • just a smidgeon. A coffee, “un café”, is constantly changed intoun cafelín”

  • orun 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 aninoorina”.

  • An old man: in Italian un vecchio becomes un vecchietto

  • A little boy ragazzoragazzino A woman (donnadonnetta)

  • A small car (macchinamacchinetta) German, often seen as a formal, harsh language, also

  • has a flair for diminutives. The suffixes “-chen”, “-leincan be added to many

  • words. A sausage, “ein Wurst”, can be turned intoeinrstchen”, which isn’t

  • necessarily a smaller sausage but one that is particularly irresistible. Likewiseein

  • ndchenisn’t necessarily a smaller dog thanein Hundbut 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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The world is a vast and often unmanageable place - so no wonder if we sometimes display

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