Diminutives in Arabic-to-English Translation
Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction/International Journal of Translation, (2012)Abstract
Traditionally, the term diminutive has been used to refer to words that denote smallness and possibly also express the speaker’s attitude. On his part, Crystal (1997:116) defines what is meant by diminutive as “a term used in morphology to refer to an affix with the general meaning of ‘little’.” Trask (1993:82) maintains that it is “a derivational affix which may be added to a word to express a notion of small size, often additionally . . . a notion of warmth or affection.” It is a common myth that English has no diminutives, but one can find out that diminutives do exist in it due to the fact that it is rare to find a book on English morphology that does not touch upon diminutives. English diminutives are categorized as synthetic and analytic: the latter are lexis signalling the sense of ‘smallness’. English has lexical units that carry the sense referred to. The units concerned do not receive morphological affixes to convey the sense in question and they are not many in number i.e. they can be counted and they belong to different word classes (e.g. (a) few, (a) little, merely, minor, solely, tinny, meager).