In the news recently has been the flap over a Nicaraguan Vice Minister of Foreign Relations [sic] (Manuel Coronel Kautz, the son of a famous Nicaraguan poet) calling the Netherlands a paisucho which was translated in English as "shitty little country". I'd never heard paisucho used in Spanish before, but before long I saw how to parse it: it's pais 'country' + -ucho. The latter is one of a small set of pejorative augmentative suffixes in the Romance languages. It is interesting that in Romance languages (as well as Slavic and Germanic ones), diminutives tend to be endearing. The opposite seems true of English where many things are described as adjective little nouns (e.g., crummy little book), while others are big old nouns. Can any of you think of counter-examples?

Well, to prevent any misunderstanding ( not affix related) The shitty little country has heard of this with it's tiny ears and doesn't care a ...(what do you expect?) We do have a lot of manure and we need it for our fertile pastures, to accomodate cows, sheep and horses. Personally I'm not vengeful. I never wasn't too fond of bananas anyway, but we will still buy them.


EDIT: understand the question but have no answer.

you mean such as..
charming little village,
Pleasant Little Kingdom (thanx to Steven Sondheim),
endearing old gentleman,
like that?

-joe (cantankerous old fart) friday

like that?

Kinda. We don't really do diminutive suffixes like some European languages. Where the suffix, by itself makes for a pejorative or meliorative connotation. I am thinking like in German Schatz 'treasure; darling' > Schätzchen 'sweetie, cutie', French fille 'girl, daughter' > fillette 'little girl (affectionate term of address)'. We used to have -ling (as in darling, gosling, etc.), but it's hardly productive these days In English most of the examples are like yours, where it's the adjective that precedes little that imparts the endearingness of the noun.

The Italians have a lot of those. Like ragazzo-ragazzaccio > boy and fat boy. Gelato-gelatone > ice cream and big ice cream. Albero-alberetto.. No, I still think that is not what you meant. I guess I do not understsnd the question after all. um.

ah. there is -ista (borrowed from Sp.) for the negative case:
fashionista
wordanista (coined by Steven Colbert)

Can any of you think of counter-examples? Little old lady?

Little old lady?

Yeah, guess so.

I've never heard paisucho, although Nicaraguans seem to know it well, which leads me to suspect that it's a Nicaraguanismo... The -ucho is not often used in Spanish. Diminutives are common (ito/a, illo/a), and the augmentive most heard is ón or ona.
You can't always tell what's what by how things look or sound when it comes to regional language use. One example in Spanish is bicho. In many countries this means a bug. In others it is slang for penis.
Then there're the sound-alikes:
pucha ~ chucha ~ chuta ~ puta
Two of the four are okay; two are unacceptable in "proper" conversation. I had a run-in with those in Chile...

For productive pejorative suffixes in English we also have -gate, although that's usually used for a self-pejorative situation.

I've taken a good look at the fixes. So affix is the general word for a variety of possibilities. And in this case we are talking of prefixes and suffixes?
The diminuative suffixes I think in our language can have an endearing as well as in a pejorative connotation. If we want to stay totally neutral, we place it the diminuative in front , like in English : een klein huis- a little house. When we use the suffixed form 'huisje' > little house, it all depends on context and intonation for being endearing or condescending.

Even schatje or Schätzchen can be used in pejorative manner.

Funny thing, I realized is that we have one word where the diminuative suffix is undetachable: 'meisje' - little girl or girl. We do not have the word 'meis', whereas we have the words 'jongen' - 'boy' and 'jongetje' - 'little boy'. "Meisje" goes straight up to young woman. Like in German "Mädchen" goes straight up to junge Frau.

( final comment on 'paisucho') I've looked up English and Dutch comments on the affair and found that the English have given a moderated version of the translation. All the Dutch translations give " klotelandje" which refers to
male reproductive parts: it's slang for 'balls'.

I've taken a good look at the fixes. So affix is the general word for a variety of possibilities. And in this case we are talking of prefixes and suffixes?

Well, I was, though I gave no examples of prefixes, I was just trying to include other languages that might use prefixes to indicate smallness. This does give me a chance to define some terms.

One of the areas of intense research in linguistics is morphology (the study of (word) forms). First, linguists usually distinguish between inflectional and derivational morphology.

Inflectional has to do with inflections like case and number endings (e.g., -s as a plural ending in nouns, -s is also a third person singular ending on verbs in the present indicative).

Derivational morphology usually deals with morphemes (the discrete bits of words) that change the meaning or syntactic category (part of speech) of a root or word. Examples: un- is a common (or productive) prefix that usually negates the word it's attached to, true and untrue. -th was originally attached to adjectives to make abstract nouns out of them: e.g., hale and health, well and wealth. -ling is a diminutive suffix gosling, duckling.

Affixes: there are prefixes un-, re-, suffixes -hood (cf. German -heit), -ship (cf. German -schaft, infixes pretty rare in English, but common enough in Sanskrit where there are a few classes of verbs (conjugations) that have -n or -nV- infixed in certain forms of the verb. Other languages have circumfixes 'around the root'.

In your example of Dutch een klein huis 'a small house', klein 'small' is not an prefix but an adjective modifying the noun huis. I agree that "a small/little house" is rather neutral connotation-wise.

German and Dutch (and many other IE languages still have significant amounts of inflections in their morphological systems, but English has lost most of its. If you look at Old English, it looks more like German or Dutch in its inflectional morphology. We still have a bunch of derivational morphology. As Faldo mentioned above, -gate (from Watergate) has become a pejorative suffix, divorced from its original meaning of either a gate in placenames or a street (cf. German Gasse 'alley'). Something simular has happened to -burger in English, no longer meaning inhabitant of a city' as in German Hamburger 'a citizen of Hamburg'.

Your example of Dutch meisje 'little girl' is interesting. In German Mädchen, the -chen is a diminutive suffix and Mäd- does not exist on its own, in that form; there is the word Magd (cf. English maid, maiden) that is sort of archaic sounding (although in Bavaria, they still refer to a young women as a Magdl. I'm sure meis existed in an earlier form of Dutch, but for some historical reason has dropped out of the language. German -chen and -lein are interesting because they are actually composed of two diminutive suffixes a piece from -k-, -l-, and -n-. This was common in other IE languages, e.g., Latin homo 'human', homunculus 'manikin'.

I'm sure meis existed in an earlier form of Dutch,
Of course, remember now. There is the old form meid, still used to tell a little girl she should be a big "meid" at some point, but it's also an old word for servant girl, cleaning help.
Level with maybe the German word Mädel. "Das Dreimäderlhaus".