Lingo : Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Dorren Gaston

Author:Dorren, Gaston [Dorren, Gaston]
Language: rus
Format: mobi
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 2015-11-04T15:51:43+00:00

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Small, sweet, slim, sturdy, sexy, stupid little women

Italian

Donna is the Italian word for ‘woman’. This is straightforward enough, but a donna is frequently not merely a donna. She’s often adorned with a tail of extra letters, turning her into a donnina, a donnetta or a donnicina, to name but three of the commonest varieties. And while these suffixes make the word longer, they tend to make the woman in question smaller. On other occasions, though, they make her more attractive, or might even suggest that the speaker – male or female – is not taking her seriously or thinks she’s ugly. When an Italian woman is given a garland of extra syllables, she knows all too well they are more than mere decoration.

What the Italians are doing here is not exceptional, but compared to their neighbours they are exceptionally keen on it. Words like donnina are called diminutives and are found throughout Europe, except for Scandinavia. In English, however, they are quite scarce, though the –ie suffix is used to create diminutives such as ‘Ronnie’, ‘hottie’, ‘sweetie’ and so on. And English does have a lot of old diminutives, such as kitten (a small cat), darling (a small dear), towelette (a small towel) and buttock (a small butt – half the size, to be exact). There is, however, no mechanism for the routine production of new ones. In Italian, on the other hand, there are loads.

This is odd, in a way. Italian obviously has its roots in Latin – the very word diminutivo comes straight from Latin – but unlike contemporary Italians, the old Romans had no such wealth of diminutives. Their ‘woman’, femina, had exactly one diminutive, femella, which has given us female. Another word for ‘woman’, or rather ‘lady, mistress’, domina (the origin of donna) had the diminutive dominula. For each noun, Latin had one diminutive rather than a whole suite, as modern Italian does.

This is a bit of a problem for Italian lexicographers. Whereas the writers of Latin dictionaries can just add ‘dim.’ to an entry and move on, Italian lexicographers have to faff about with all sorts of explanations. For instance, donnicciuola denotes a simpleton of a woman, according to the renowned nineteenth-century dictionary Tommaseo-Bellini, while donnettaccia expresses disdain. A donnicciuoluccia, by contrast, describes a very small woman, and is not intended as an insult per se – though occasionally it may be. These last three words are nowadays somewhat outmoded, but the forms mentioned above – donnina, donnetta and the like – are all in use, and each has its own nuances. Yet all are simply termed diminutivi, a label that fails to do justice to their sheer abundance and complexity.

In addition to all sorts of diminutives, Italian also a raft of so-called augmentatives, which are the opposite of diminutives: they denote bigness, or qualities associated with large size. Whereas English augmentatives are formed by means of prefixes such as super-, mega-, hyper- and so forth, Italian creates a rather more extensive arsenal of augmentatives by means of suffixes.

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