Hello everybody !

Can someone tell me the meaning of putting xxxxxLEIIN before a surname ? for example Rocioleiin, HansLEIIN, PatrickLEIIN, and so on!

Does it have any meaning in swiss german ?

Thanks

hi there
in swiss german its usually -li hansli, hässli (baby bunnies), entli (ducklings) etc. -lein is german dimunitive.
sd

I'm affraid that needs elaboration, because there are practically no diminutive forms in English, except, for instance, kitchenette, booklet, gauntlet and a handful of others, and all of them are made up with the French -et / -ette ending because the concept of the diminutive bearly exists in English.

Ok rociolopoz, those endings are used to make the object the original noun stands for sort of smaller or cuter. High German: "Haus" = "house"; "Häuschen" or "Häuslein" = "little house." Swiss German: "Huus" / "Hüüsli" (there's no equivalent to "Häuschen" in Swiss German).

Please note that Swiss German is the only language I know that can use diminutives even with verbs, e.g. "schäffele" (to work a little bit), "möölele" (to paint a little bit). In Swiss German that's absolutely normal every-day usuage. In High German there are only a few verbs that allow such, for instance "tröpfeln" as the diminutive of "tropfen" (to drip a little bit). In Switzerland pretty much everything is a bit smaller than elsewhere...

In this context, the equivalent English diminutive would be -y, as in Johnny, Freddy, or, in the case of surnames, Smithy and Blakey.

Use of this diminutive was obligatory for boys of school age during the seventies and eighties, except for longer names which were abbreviated with the suffix -z or -zza, leading to Daz, Gaz and Baz (or Dazza, Gazza and Bazza), from Darren, Gary and Barratt.

I cannot confirm, however, whether this was ever standard English usage, or merely a consequence of the idio(syncra)tic dialect what we spoke where I was brung up.

Hope this helps...

You have answered a question I've wondered about for ages - how people got Gaz for Gary, etc.

Seems to be very UK usage.

Thanks

An interesting observation, but not entirely true. When I first started learning German, I was quite excited to discover that the diminutive -chen has a cognate in the English -kin (mannikin, catkin, lambkin).

There are several other diminutive suffixes in English, such as -ock (hillock, bollock), -ling (duckling, gosling) and so on, but they are not relevant to this particular discussion.

Bollock is diminutive?

Indeed it is: Bollocks are 'ballocks' or 'little balls'.

Not mine, of course. But generally...

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.

On the other hand, in German, the meaning of pretty much every noun can be modified to the smaller and / or cuter side by adding a diminutive suffix. In Swiss German, that mania reaches its culmination, just as in Greek, by the way. Germans make fun of us, but, funny enough, the diminutive they use most often when talking to Swiss people is "Fränkli" (a diminutive of the Swiss Franc), not knowing that "Franken" is one of the very few words of which a Swiss would hardly ever use a diminutive.

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.

Don't forget Rumpelstiltskin !

We have a new captain of pedantry amongst us :-)

I adore the German diminutives - mainly because all words ending in -chen and -lein are neuter (das ...) and it's much easier than trying to remember the gender of the 'large' original noun.

but you have to admit it is a bit weird when your burly colleague says bye over the phone (to another adult male colleague) with thüsli, schöne tägli - it still makes me look twice!!!

"Tschüsschen" sounds pretty awful too

The word Yankee may have its origin in the Dutch Jankin meaning Little John... "a name applied disparagingly by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (New York) to English colonists in neighboring Connecticut."

LOL. My American Other Half (AOH) calls me "Skipper" and sometimes "my pedantic Skipper." However, she concedes that pedantry often is much more useful than sloppiness.