/ˌkrəʊməˈtɒɡrəfi/

It certainly does! Latin diminutives are usually formed by adding -olus (-a, -um) or -colus (-a, -um) or a variation thereof to the noun stem. There are several grammatical rules about how to do this depending on the sounds found in the stem, but some potentially feline examples:

filiolus/filiola (little son/daughter; from filius)

bestiolus/a (little creature; from bestia)

corculus/a (little heart; from cor)

deliciolae (darling; from delicium)

22/01/2024

A Year in Language, Day 61: Welsh

Welsh, known to itself as Cymraeg, is the Language of Wales which occupies a good chunk of the western U.K. It is a Celtic language like Irish, but is in the Brittonic family, alongside Breton and Cornish, as opposed to the Goidelic family of Irish, Scots, and Manx.

Welsh is known for having long impenetrable words, which is mostly due to its orthography than its actual pronunciation. For one the letters “y” and “w”, consonants in English, represent vowels in Welsh, roughly an unstressed schwa /ə/ and /u/ respectively. Welsh also employs a significant number of double letters to bolster its alphabet, so “l” and “ll” are actually completely different sounds. The letter “c” in Welsh is always hard (IPA: /k/) but was only really became a part of the alphabet in the 16th century, before which “k” was the preferred letter. Why the switch? Because /k/ is a very common sound in Welsh, and the printing presses, designed for English, simply didn’t have enough “k” stamps, or as William Salesbury, one of the men responsible for translating and printing the Welsh bible, so delightfully puts it: “C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth”.

Welsh is relatively typical for a Celtic language, if a language family with only 6 living members can form enough of a coalition to have a “typical”. Like Irish Gaelic it undergoes grammatical consonant mutations, where the sounds change not due to the phonetic conditions but due to syntax. Literary Welsh maintains a system by which Welsh verbs conjugated into a number of tenses, though in colloquial Welsh they more frequently use periphrastic constructions like in English, wherein extra verbs (like be, do, will, etc.) are stacked to show tense and other features. Welsh does have a few unique sounds not common to its Celtic or Indo-European sisters. All it’s nasal consonants have voiceless counterparts, and it contains the lateral fricative, something like if an /l/ and an /s/ produced a hybrid offspring.

2022.07.03 // 18:48  cold brew, coffeecake muffin, and chicago style

05.03.2021 ✨ Study set up 📚✨