| Quote: | |  | |
| Thanks for that addition. However, mannikin / manikin directly comes from Dutch mannekijn (little man), so it's not an English diminutive, and catkin, at least according to Merriam-Webster's On-Line Dictionary, comes "from its resemblance to a cat's tail," i.e. the "kin" part is just the English noun "kin," not a diminutive ending. Lambkin -- maybe yes, and a few more, such as pipkin and some more extremely rarely used words, most of them not even listed in the dictionary mentioned above. | |
| | |
Nonetheless, the concept of the diminutive suffix is not alien to the English language, as implied in your previous post.
I do agree, however, that the frequency of use of diminutive forms in modern English may be somewhat less than that in Swiss German (and Greek), except in people's and animals' names, where the impulse to make them 'cute' or 'familiar' is just as strong as it ever was.