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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?
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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 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.
Last edited by BranShea; 11/14/09 07:06 PM.
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you mean such as..
charming little village,
Pleasant Little Kingdom (thanx to Steven Sondheim),
endearing old gentleman,
like that?
-joe (cantankerous old fart) friday
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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.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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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.
Last edited by BranShea; 11/14/09 10:22 PM.
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ah. there is -ista (borrowed from Sp.) for the negative case:
fashionista
wordanista (coined by Steven Colbert)
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Can any of you think of counter-examples? Little old lady?
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Little old lady?
Yeah, guess so.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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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...
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For productive pejorative suffixes in English we also have -gate, although that's usually used for a self-pejorative situation.
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