another cãozinho
I was keeping track of the diminutives I heard in Portugal by memory, but only really started writing them down back in March when I published the little anecdote about Ice the Cãozinho (I hear cãozinho all the time).
I know other languages have diminutives, but it isn’t such a common practice in English except in Australia, where they’re fond of reducing words and adding a -y (eg., pressie for present, Chrissy for Christmas, etc.). I would call my nieces and nephew kidlets when they were small, but that’s about the only regular diminutive I used. In English the diminutives are mostly for names: Billy, Maddy, Katie, Johnny, et al.
In Portugal using diminutives is a regular part of everyday speech. Super regular. Bordering-on-a-tic regular. One day in the middle of April I decided to keep track of the ones I heard, just for that one day. I only made it through a few hours of tracking them before I had to give up — they were in every single sentence!
To those just starting to learn the Portuguese language: you’re not hearing things… the Portuguese do take small words (prato) and make them BIGGER (pratinho) to make them smaller or cuter! Does this make sense?? (Don’t answer that.) The extremely common ones are words like beijinhos (kisses) which people use to say goodbye, or cafezinho (coffee), but it seems no Portuguese word is safe from being affectionately bastardized.
Here’s the list I heard in just a few hours from a few people:
garafinha, from garrafa (bottle)
tripinhas, from tripas (tripe, the food)
continha, from conta (the bill)
garfinho, from garfo (fork)
biscoitinho, from biscoito (cookie)
pratinhos, from pratos (plates)
cartinha, from cartão (card)
I don’t know if diminutives are as prevalent in other languages, but the Portuguese ought to give this practice a different name to be more descriptive. After all, they aren’t making the words smaller, they’re expanding them. According to Wikipedia, Polish and Spanish have double diminutives (yikes) and triple diminutives exist in other languages (oh my), so maybe we should ditch them all for Esperanto… no?
