1. Introduction
In West Frisian (henceforth: Frisian) the stock of personal names can be enriched in various ways, one of which is diminution. Diminutive names, so it seems, can in their turn undergo a process of shortening, consisting of omitting the diminutive suffix. This is illustrated in (1):
Since suffix subtraction is not a common morphological process, either in general or in Frisian, the assumption of this process requires extensive motivation, the more so because an analysis in terms of name-final schwa deletion applied to the base form seems to be an alternative. For instance, one finds shortened men’s names such as Syp [sip] and Wyp [wip] alongside the full forms of these names, that is, Sibe [si:bə] and Wibe [vi:bə],Footnote 1 in which case an analysis in terms of name-final schwa deletion seems to be called for.
In this study, we present a survey of Frisian diminutive names and their shortened versions, and argue for an analysis of this shortening as deletion of the diminutive suffix. It is also shown how this pattern of name formation can be insightfully accounted for within the framework of Construction Morphology, in which paradigmatic relations between words play a central role.
The structure of this article is as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of the diminution of nouns and personal names in Frisian. Section 3 addresses the question whether the short names result from schwa deletion or from suffix subtraction. The arguments pro and con are then treated more fully in section 4 (schwa deletion) and section 5 (suffix subtraction). A blocking condition on the formation of shortened names is given in section 6, whereas the pragmatics of these names is treated in section 7. Section 8 provides a formal account of suffix subtraction, within the framework of Construction Morphology. The article concludes with some final remarks (section 9).
2. Diminution in Frisian
Diminution is a widespread phenomenon in FrisianFootnote 2 and applies mainly to count nouns (section 2.1) and personal names (section 2.2). Diminution is achieved by adding a diminutive suffix to the stem of the base noun. Diminutive nouns and diminutive personal names share both the diminutive suffixes and their distribution, so from a formal point of view, diminution of nouns and personal names can be regarded as one and the same operation.Footnote 3
2.1. The formation of diminutive nouns
The main function of a diminutive noun in Frisian is to denote a small exemplar of the referents of the base noun in question. Besides, a diminutive noun may have a non-neutral, affective (pejorative or meliorative) connotation, for instance one of endearment.
For nouns, there are four diminutive suffixes: -kje, -je, -tsje, and -ke. Their distribution is determined by the final segment of the stem they attach to:
-
-kje after the velar nasal /ŋ/;
-
-je after the other velar consonants;
-
-tsje after the dental-alveolar consonants /l,n,d,t/;
-
-ke in all other contexts, i.e. following (semi-)vowels, labials or labiodentals, and the dental-alveolars /s/, /z/ and /r/.
Examples of the diminution of nouns are given in (2):
Some remarks on details of the formal aspects of dimunition are in order.
As can be seen from stange ‘bar, rod’ in (2a) and planke ‘board’ in (2b), noun-final schwa does not show up in diminutives and does not play a role in determining the choice of the diminutive suffix. Therefore, the diminutives bankje (/baŋk+jə/) ‘small couch’, from bank ‘couch’, and plankje (/plaŋk+jə/) ‘small board’, from planke ‘board’, end up as a rhyming pair.
The diminutive of laach /la:ɣ/ ‘layer’, with the underlying voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ (cf. the plural form lagen [la:ɣən] ‘layers’), is laachje [la:xjə], with the voiceless fricative [x] (which is also reflected by the spelling <ch>). The diminutives krabke ‘small crab’ and skúfke ‘small bolt’ in (2d) are realized with a voiceless obstruent ─ [p] and [f], respectively ─ whereas kraab ‘crab’ underlyingly ends in voiced /b/ and skúf ‘bolt’ in voiced /v/, witness the plurals krabben and skuven, with [b] and [v], respectively.Footnote 6
As the diminutives padsje ‘small path’ and rotsje ‘small rat’ (2c) illustrate, after a stem ending in <d> or <t>, the suffix -tsje is spelled as <sje>. This is purely a matter of orthography (in fact, the spelling was <tsje> until the Frisian spelling reform of 1976).
The diminutives padsje ‘small path’ and rotsje ‘small rat’ in (2c) and aike ‘small egg’, krabke ‘small crab’, and skúfke ‘small bolt’ in (2d) show Vowel Shortening, whereas beamke ‘small tree’ and tuorke ‘small tower’ in (2d) display Modern Frisian Vowel Breaking (shortening is reflected in the spelling, breaking is not, with the exception of <uo>, which denotes /wo/, see tuorke). Both processes occur under the same conditions, predominantly in derived forms (see also section 5.2 below).
2.2. Diminutive personal names
Like diminutive nouns, diminutive personal names in Frisian may have the connotation of endearment, but the main function of the diminution of personal names in Frisian is enlarging the stock of such names.
Diminution of personal names has the capacity to turn a men’s name into a women’s name, but not the other way around. A diminutive women’s name, thus, may occur alongside either a men’s or a women’s name, whereas a diminutive men’s name stands next to a men’s name only. Examples of the diminution of personal names are given in (3) (m = men’s name, w = women’s name):
Men’s names can also be accompanied by a diminutive men’s name or both a diminutive men’s and women’s name, examples of which are given in (4):
Although, as noted, diminutive nouns and diminutive personal names are alike as to the form of the diminutive suffixes and their distribution, they differ in the choice of the definite singular article. Frisian has two grammatical genders, that is, neuter and non-neuter. Instead of using these terms, it has become customary in Frisian linguistics to divide the nouns with respect to gender according to the choice of the definite singular article, that is, de (non-neuter) and it (neuter). Hence there are de-words and it-words (see Visser Reference Visser2011). The difference between diminutive nouns and diminutive personal names in this respect is that the former are neuter (it-words) and the latter non-neuter (de-words). A diminutive personal name, thus, combines with the article de, and not with it. This links up with the fact that personal names in general are de-words. This means that a men’s name like Teake, a women’s name like Tine, a diminutive men’s name like Wopke, and a diminutive women’s name like Jantsje, when followed by a complement, combine with the article de, as in de Teake/Tine/Wopke/Jantsje fan myn dreamen ‘the Teake/Tine/Wopke/Jantsje of my dreams’ and de Teake/Tine/Wopke/Jantsje dy’t dêr rint ‘the Teake/Tine/Wopke/Jantsje who walks there’.
3. Short personal names: schwa deletion or suffix subtraction?
As illustrated in (5) below ─ see also (1) above ─ personal names may show up in triplets. For the greater part, these triplets consist of the base form ending in schwa (the left-hand column), a bisyllabic diminutive name (the middle column), and a short, monosyllabic name (the right-hand column). The name ending in schwa is a men’s name, the diminutive name is either a women’s or a men’s name, which also holds for the short name.
Though it is clear that the names of these triplets are related, the question here is how the short, monosyllabic name relates to the base form and the diminutive name, both of which are bisyllabic. There seem to be two options. One is to derive the short name from the base form by means of schwa deletion. The other is to derive the short name from the diminutive name − itself derived from the base form − by deletion of the diminutive suffix, that is, by suffix subtraction. These options are illustrated in (6) for the short name Aach:
In what follows, we investigate which option accounts for the facts in the most insightful way. We consider the schwa deletion analysis first (section 4), then we have a look at the analysis in terms of suffix subtraction, and argue that the latter is to be preferred (section 5).
4. Schwa deletion
An analysis of the short names in terms of schwa deletion has an advantage over one in terms of suffix subtraction in that the latter process does not occur elsewhere in Frisian, whereas schwa deletion does.Footnote 9 Frisian has many (bisyllabic) schwa-final nouns, quite a few of which are in variation with a (monosyllabic) noun without this schwa.Footnote 10 This is exemplified in (7):
This pattern is comparable to that of the pairs of personal names in (8):
As noted in section 2.2, Frisian has two grammatical genders, that is, neuter and non-neuter. The grammatical gender of nouns is a lexical property. It is, however, an abstract property, which does not have an overt expression on the noun itself and only manifests itself by means of the agreement relations the nouns enter into.Footnote 12
However this may be, there does seem to be a correlation between noun-final schwa and the article de or, put differently, a schwa-final noun in Frisian can only be a de-word, whereas schwa-less nouns are either de- or it-words (while a small handful of these are both). This is nicely illustrated by the fact that some nouns show an alternation between a (monosyllabic) schwa-less it- and a (bisyllabic) schwa-final de-variant, as exemplified in (9):
Noun-final schwa, therefore, seems to have the status of a suffix, one that determines non-neuter grammatical gender. Though attractive at first sight, this analysis meets with problems. A suffix represents grammatical and semantic information. This is not the case for noun-final schwa, which does not contribute to the meaning of the word it is part of, as is clear from the pairs of nouns in (7) above.Footnote 13 Also, schwa is often deleted when the noun in question is the left-hand member of a compound, and it is systematically deleted when the noun is involved in diminution or conversion into a verb, without loss of grammatical and semantic information. Instead of analyzing noun-final schwa as a suffix, therefore, one had better assume a relation between the phonological shape of a noun’s right-hand edge and its grammatical gender.
The names in (8) are either men’s or women’s names. Schwa’s presence or absence does not seem to have any bearing on this referential property. This is different from the names in (5), where the schwa-final names in the left-hand column are men’s names and the schwa-less variants in the right-hand column are women’s names. Besides a formal difference, the names in (8), on the other hand, also show a semantic-pragmatic, referential difference between the schwa-final names and their schwa-less counterparts. This can be observed, for instance, for the schwa-final men’s names Age and Bauke and the women’s names Aach and Bauk without final schwa.Footnote 14
At first sight, in order to account for the relation between the schwa-final nouns and names and their schwa-less counterparts ‒ in (8) and (9), respectively ‒ an analysis in terms of schwa deletion seems to work fine. However, though schwa deletion is a phonological process of some generality in Frisian, it is not productive in word-final position; the variation in (7) and (8) does not apply to all words and names with a final schwa.Footnote 15 From a synchronic point of view, then, both members of the noun pairs in (7) and the name pairs in (8) are to be considered independent members of the Frisian lexicon, without the schwa-less variant being derived synchronically from the schwa-final one.
The situation for the names in (5) is different, as both the formal relation and the referential difference between the schwa-final names and the ones without final schwa must be accounted for. If schwa deletion provides the formal link between the names, it has to be assumed that this phonological process is able to cause a change in the referential potential of a name.
The relation between the schwa-final names and the ones without final schwa could be analyzed within Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy & Prince Reference McCarthy, Prince and Goldsmith1995), since phonological operations with a morphological function lie at the heart of this framework. We think, however, that an alternative analysis, one in terms of subtracting the diminutive suffix from the diminutive name, is to be preferred, for which we adduce evidence in the following section.
5. Suffix subtraction
As noted in section 2.2, diminution of personal names has the capacity to turn a men’s name into a women’s name, but not the other way around. A diminutive women’s name, thus, may occur alongside either a men’s or a women’s name, whereas a diminutive men’s name stands next to a men’s name only. Though diminutive names may be men’s names or both men’s and women’s names, they are women’s names in the majority of cases, as illustrated by the name triplets in (5), repeated here for convenience as (10):
The diminutive name and the short name are referentially equal, which need not be the case with the base form and the diminutive name.
Another feature of Frisian personal names is that they may display “double diminution,” that is, a diminutive name may have undergone diminution again. Names with double diminution all end in -kje, the combination of the diminutive suffixes -ke and -je,Footnote 16 and they all are women’s names. Double diminution, then, may give rise to quadruplets of names, examples of which are given in (11):
The short name can have two sources, either the simple diminutive name, with the suffix -ke, or the name with double diminution, with the double suffix -kje.
Since there seems to be a direct relationship, both formally and referentially, between the diminutive and the short names, one might assume the latter to result from omitting the diminutive suffix from the former, as expressed by the schema in (12):
The three main arguments for assuming suffix subtraction to establish the relation between the diminutive name and the short name, hence in favor of (12), are those in (13):
In the following three subsections, further evidence for these arguments is adduced.
5.1. The referential inequality of the short name and the base form
Although the base form and the diminutive name can be “referentially equal,” this is often not the case, since diminution can turn a men’s name into a women’s name. There is, however, always referential equality between the diminutive name and the short name, as illustrated by the triplets and quadruplets of names in (10) and (11). The reference of the short name, thus, depends on that of the diminutive name. Therefore, in order to know what the short form, referentially speaking, “is about,” one has to know which diminutive name it is related to. Take the short name Sim in (10), which can be either a men’s or a women’s name, depending on whether the diminutive name Simke is a men’s or a women’s name. One, therefore, cannot know whether Sim is the name of a particular man or woman, if one does not know whether Simke refers to that man or women in real life.
The diminutive name and the short name are referentially equal, which need not be the case with the base form and the short form. The fact that, for instance, Aach and Aachje and Jouk and Joukje are women’s names, in distinction from the men’s names Age and Jouke, is a consequence of suffix subtraction. The men’s names Tsjepke – Tsjep and Wopke – Wop are related to the men’s names Tsjebbe and Wobbe. Though an analysis in terms of name-final schwa deletion would work fine for deriving the short forms Tsjep and Wop from Tsjebbe and Wobbe, we opt for deriving Tsjep and Wop from the diminutive names Tsjepke and Wopke by means of suffix subtraction as well, since this yields a uniform analysis, in line with generalization (12).
5.2. Modern Frisian Vowel Breaking and Vowel Shortening
Diminution of nouns often goes together with Vowel Breaking or Vowel Shortening. Vowel Breaking involves the alternation between a centering diphthong and a glide+vowel sequence, and Vowel Shortening the alternation between a long and a short monophthong.Footnote 18 Both phonological alternations show up in by and large the same morphological environment, that is, a complex word created through suffixation or compounding. Both involve (a form of) nucleus shortening and can therefore be regarded as “functionally equivalent.”Footnote 19 Vowel Breaking and Vowel Shortening may be regarded as instances of “trochaic shortening,” for which diminution creates a “natural embedding.”Footnote 20
Short (monosyllabic) women’s names ending in a single consonant may have a glide+vowel sequence or a short monophthong, as opposed to the related monosyllabic men’s names with the corresponding centering diphthong or long vowel. This difference can be explained by assuming that the short women’s names derived from the bisyllabic diminutive women’s names – with a glide+vowel sequence or a short vowel – which in their turn derived from the monosyllabic men’s names, with a centering diphthong or a long vowel. The short women’s names, thus, inherited the glide+vowel sequence or the short vowel from the diminutive women’s names or, put differently, the stem allomorphy triggered by diminution is preserved in the short names.
This has resulted in pairs of names with, on the one hand, monosyllabic men’s names with a centering diphthong/long monophthong and, on the other hand, monosyllabic women’s names with the “corresponding” glide+vowel sequences/short monophthongs. An overview of these cases, taken from Hoekema (Reference Hoekema1986), is given in (14):
The glide-vowel sequences and the short monophthongs in the names in the right-hand columns are straightforwardly explained by assuming that these short names derive from diminutive names with Vowel Breaking or Vowel Shortening, as shown in (15):
The (full) vowel of Klaske and Klas, /a/, is also revealing here. Frisian has the phonotactic constraint that within a morpheme a dental-alveolar consonant is preceded by the half-open back vowel /ɔ/ to the exclusion of the open central vowel /a/.Footnote 23 If, however, /a/ is the result of shortening of the long vowel /a:/, it is able to precede a dental-alveolar consonant, as in hastich ‘hasty’ [hastəx] (cf. haast ‘haste’ [ha:st]), master ‘teacher, (school)master’ [mastər] (cf. the older form maaster [ma:stər]), and hazze ‘hare’ (cf. the Dutch cognate haas [ha:s]). The central vowel of Klaske and Klas, thus, reflects the derivation of Klaske from Klaas, with a long vowel, and Klas from Klaske, both with a short vowel.
The effects of Vowel Breaking and Vowel Shortening have been encoded in the lexical representation of these diminutive names, in line with the fact that these phonological processes are no longer productive. Vowel Breaking and Vowel Shortening, therefore, are best considered as the cause of stem allomorphy here. It should be noted that the effects of Vowel Breaking and Vowel Shortening show up in the short names, although they lack the trigger of this allomorphy pattern.
5.3. Marked phonology in the short names
If the diminutive names are the basis of the short names, it follows that the latter have final consonants which also show up in underived words and names. This is different for names with double diminution, in which case the short name may have “non-canonical” final clusters, that is, final clusters not found in underived words or names, witness the examples in (16) (see also those in the right-hand column of (11), after the slash):
The non-canonical constellations of the short names consist of (a) a cluster of two plosives (Saapk, Wopk, Tsjepk, Sipk),Footnote 24 (b) a cluster of a nasal and a heterorganic plosive (Romk), or (c) the combination of a liquid and a plosive preceded by a long instead of a short vowel (Eelk). These constellations do not occur in underived words or names, which may be taken as an indication that names like those in the rightmost column of (16) are of a derived character. Note, furthermore, that the short names are referentially equal to the names with double diminution in the third, but not necessarily to the “simple” diminutive names in the second column.Footnote 25
If this analysis of the short names is on the right track, one is dealing here with a case of suffix subtraction. This is not a common morphological process in Frisian, where additive morphology is the default case. Dressler (Reference Dressler, Booij, Lehmann and Mugdan2000:581) calls suffix subtraction a “very infrequent” process in the morphology of natural languages. Manova (Reference Manova2019), in her overview of subtraction phenomena, also notes that additive morphology is the rule and subtractive morphology the exception.Footnote 26
There are various phenomena which show that language users have access to the internal morphological structure of existing words. Suffix substitution is a cross-linguistic example of this phenomenon (Booij Reference Booij2010:31–36). For example, Dutch female deverbal nouns in -ster may be derived from their male counterparts in -er, by substituting -er with -ster, as in padvind-ster ‘lit. female path finder, girl scout’, derived from padvind-er ‘lit. path finder, boy scout’, where the idiosyncratic meaning of the noun in -er recurs in the noun in -ster. Truncation of morphemes in nouns is another instance of this accessibility. Frisian, for instance, has instances of truncation, which affects augments − morphemes which have lost their meaning and function − followed by a suffix or preceded by a prefix. Examples, all taken from Hoekstra (Reference Hoekstra1998), are provided in (17):
In addition, there are cases of back formation, in which a suffix is omitted, all of which concern the diminutive suffix. The diminutive noun pretsje ‘birthday party for children’ − Dutch pret ‘fun’ + the Frisian diminutive suffix -tsje − has the short form pret, indicating, in a humorous way, a birthday party for adults. The noun suertsje ‘candy, sweet, goodie’ − a loan translation from Dutch zuurtje (zuur ‘sour’ + -tje), adapted as suer ‘sour’ + the Frisian diminutive suffix -tsje − is a contemptuous designation of a person who hardly ventures anything. The short form suert expresses even more contempt.Footnote 27 Dutch also seems to have some instances. The diminutive noun toetje ‘dessert’ (literally: what is added to the dinner) − the adverb toe, denoting addition + the diminutive suffix -tje − has the short form toet.Footnote 28 And the noun meisje ‘girl’ – a diminutive noun, consisting of the root meis + the diminutive suffix -je – also shows up as meis, especially as a form of address. Though pret, suert, toet, and meis may sound a little bit “firmer” and “more substantial” than pretsje, suertsje, toetje, and meisje, it is hard to indicate what the exact semantic effect of omitting the suffix here is.Footnote 29
These observations show that manipulating the internal morphological structure of words is not uncommon, which renders suffix subtraction in names a not implausible option. Deriving short names from diminutive names by omitting the diminutive suffix appears to have been a productive pattern. This is different for the above cases of back formation, in which the diminutive suffix is also omitted. There must be a distinction, then, between personal names and nouns, such that the former can undergo suffix subtraction in a regular way, whereas the latter hardly can. We conjecture that this has to do with the fact that the specific pragmatic effects of this deletion are particularly relevant for personal names, an issue which is turned to in section 7.Footnote 30
6. Blocking of diminutive suffix subtraction
A schema for relating the short names to the diminutive names is given in (12) above, repeated here as (18):
This schema expresses a generalization without reference to specific classes of names and specific diminutive suffixes. This is in line with what can be considered to be the null hypothesis concerning (the formation of) these short names, that is, that each diminutive name may have a short counterpart.
As it stands, however, (18) entails an overgeneration of short names. Although, from a formal point of view, every diminutive name lends itself to omitting the diminutive suffix, this may lead to less usable and therefore less practical short names. There seems to be a pragmatically motivated restriction, expressed by blocking condition (19):
In line with (19), short names like Foek (< Foekje), Jel (< Jeltsje), Rins (< Rinske), and Ibel (< Ibeltsje) are all right, for they do not equal an existing name, whereas short names like Jan (< Jantsje), Wierd (< Wierdsje), and Hessel (< Hesseltsje) are not, since all three of them equal an existing (men’s) name.Footnote 31
Condition (19) takes effect with respect to diminutive names derived from base forms not ending in schwa, like the women’s names Jantsje and Sjoerdsje, alongside the men’s names Jan and Sjoerd. Omitting the diminutive suffix from Jantsje and Sjoerdsje leads to a name the form of which equals that of Jan and Sjoerd. It is, however, only the form of the name, but not its referential contents which is returned to. Omitting the diminutive suffix from a diminutive women’s name does not result in the men’s name which stood at the basis of diminution, for the result is a women’s name. This may lead to confusion, for Jan and Sjoerd would then be both a men’s and a women’s name, that is, they would be names that are formally indistinguishable on this score, which renders them less convenient and less practical in social interaction.Footnote 32
With names ending in schwa things are different. The formation of a diminutive name from such names entails the deletion of name-final schwa. Here, then, omitting the diminutive suffix does not result in a return to the base form of the name, but the result is the base form without final schwa. This leads to the name triplets in (5)/(10), consisting of a bisyllabic schwa-final name, a bisyllabic diminutive name, and a short name with omitted diminutive suffix, like Hille (m) – Hiltsje (w) – Hil (w), Jouke (m) – Joukje (w) – Jouk (w), and Wobbe (m) – Wopke (m) – Wop (m). Due to the formal difference between the schwa-final base form and the schwa-less short name, the latter falls outside the scope of condition (19). This also implies that the short forms are able to function as names in their own right, so that they can be considered as oppositional-functional elements within a network of names.
7. The pragmatics of shortened names
Morphology deals with the systematic correlation between the form and meaning of words. Besides semantics, the notion “meaning” may also comprise pragmatics, since the meaning contribution of a morphological process may (also) have to be defined in pragmatic terms (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi Reference Dressler, Merlini Barbaresi and Huang2017).
The pragmatic value of the shortened names discussed in this article is characterized by Schurer (Reference Schurer1939:20–21) as follows:
Uit de eeuwen vóór 1700 zijn ons overgebracht de volgende vrouwennamen, vaak ook in het aparte spellingskleed van die tijden: Fock, Romk, Ansk, Hylck, Frouck, Imck, Popk, Sjouck, Bouk, Foeck, Wyck, Tjamck, Bayck [Bauck, wv], Siuwk, Swobk….
Voor Friesche ooren klinken die vrl. namen kort, afgebeten, ferm en stoer, “stûf” zegt de Fries. Ze roepen onwillekeurig historische gestalten op van fiere edelvrouwen, zittende op strijdpaarden, de teugels in de linker, het zwaard in de rechterhand. Er zijn ook Friesche Kenau’s geweest!
En het zijn dezelfde namen, die nog heden ten dage de schoolmeisjes, spontaan als ze zijn in de hitte van het spel … elkaar toeroepen: “Do moast, Sjouk! ‘t Is dyn beurt, Hylk! Né Foek, det ‘s net earlik en do kreauwst (schelmen) ek mei, smoarge Lutsk!
Translated from Dutch and Frisian:
The centuries before 1700 passed on to us women’s names like: Fock, Romk, Ansk, Hylck, Frouck, Imck, Popk, Sjouck, Bouk, Foeck, Wyck, Tjamck, Bauck, Siuwk, Swobk, often also spelled in line with the conventions of those days….
To Frisian ears these women’s names sound short, clipped, robust, and tough, “stûf” as the Frisians say. They inadvertently evoke historical figures of proud noblewomen, sitting on war-horses, the reins in their left, the sword in their right hand. There have been Frisian battle-axes!
And the very same names [the monosyllabic women’s names earlier in the citation, Fock, Romk, etc.] are still used at present by schoolgirls, spontaneous as they are in the heat of the game, when they shout: “You’re next, Sjouk! It’s your turn, Hylk! Oh no Foek, that’s not playing the game and you act like a villain as well, dirty Lutsk!.
Shortened women’s names, thus, are perceived as having the pragmatic value of toughness, as also expressed in the following quotation, from the Frisian politician Lutz Jacobi (italics added to the names):
From this citation it can be gathered that for Lutz Jacobi and her female friend their official names, the diminutive names Lutske (Luts+ke) and Wytske (Wyts+ke), form the basis of their current names, the short names Luts (Lutz) and Wyts (Wytz). The diminutive names appear to have been consciously adapted here by omitting the diminutive suffix, in accordance with an existing pattern. This means that the men’s names Lutse and Wytse, from which Lutske and Wytske derive, are not the direct source of Lutz and Wytz.
That it is the diminutive suffix which is omitted in this name formation process is also clear from obituary notices, in which the death is notified of, for instance, Froukje (a woman) or Wopke (a man), popularly known as (ús) Frouk ‘(our) Frouk’ and (ús) Wop ‘(our) Wop’. For those who have these notices published – relatives, friends, acquaintances – there must be a direct relationship between the names Froukje and Wopke on the one hand and Frouk and Wop on the other. If, for instance, in such a notice the women’s name Foekje shows up, together with the short form (ús) Foek, no connection of Foek with the men’s name Foeke is intended or felt. There is a formal relationship between the “official” names Froukje, Wopke, and Foekje on the one hand and the “everyday” names Frouk, Wop, and Foek on the other.Footnote 35 There is, thus, a direct relationship between the diminutive name and the short name, one in which the diminutive name is the “basic” name and the short name the “derived” member of the pair. These are the only forms which count, other forms have no role to play. Short names, like Luts and Wyts, are perceived as Lutske and Wytske without the diminutive suffix, in line with schema (18) above.
Furthermore, two things are to be noted. Firstly, the shortened names often have a non-neutral connotation. For Lutz Jacobi and her girlfriend they count as “robust” and “tough.” Secondly, since many pet and diminutive names have become names in their own right, they are also given as first names to children. This is different for the shortened names, which do not seem to fit young children. An important pragmatic aspect of pet and diminutive names is their connotation of endearment, that is, of closeness and tenderness. Although the shortened names derive from diminutive names, they have a connotation of robustness and toughness, which seems to be incompatible with infants.Footnote 36
8. A formal account
This article presents an extensive survey of the phenomenon of shortening of diminutive names by omitting the diminutive suffix in Frisian. This pattern of name formation can be insightfully accounted for within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij Reference Booij2010). It is not our aim here to compare this account with possible alternative accounts in competing morphological frameworks, but only to show that Construction Morphology is an adequate framework for the description of the facts presented, because it allows for the formal expression of paradigmatic relationships between morphological schemas.
Diminutive nouns can be accounted for by the schema in (22a), diminutive names by the subschema in (22b). The short names, along with their pragmatic value, can be accounted for by the second-order schema – also called a “sisterschema” (Jackendoff & Audring Reference Jackendoff and Audring2020) – in (23):
A second-order schema is a set of two or more paradigmatically related schemas (Booij & Masini Reference Booij, Masini, Bauer, Körtvélyessy and Štekauer2015). This relationship is formally expressed by coindexation of the relevant parts of these schemas. (The symbol “≈” is used to indicate that the schemas are related paradigmatically.)
Second-order schema (23) expresses that the absence of a suffix can carry information because it is opposed to the presence of that suffix in a related word. This reminds us of how inflectional systems may work. For instance, the absence of an overt inflectional ending may mark a specific inflectional property of a word, as it contrasts with the presence of such an ending in another inflectional form of that word, as in English, where singular forms of nouns are marked by the lack of an ending, in contrast to plural forms that carry an overt plural suffix.
Usually, a personal name is either a men’s or a women’s name, which property is preserved in the subtracted form of these names. This is expressed by the coindexation of the property “Personal name.” The use of the phonological variable X in this schema expresses that these words have the same stem allomorph.
The omission of the diminutive suffix in personal names not only implies the preservation of referential information, but also the addition of pragmatic information, which is insightfully expressed by making use of paradigmatically related schemas.
Note that constructional schemas are output-oriented, that is, they express generalizations about words in their output forms. Thus, it is predicted that the effects of Vowel Breaking and Vowel Shortening are also found in subtracted names, in which the trigger of these allomorphy patterns is no longer present (section 5.2).
9. Concluding remarks
This article aimed to show how the stock of personal names in Frisian can be enriched by means of shortening diminutive names through deletion of the diminutive suffix. Although suffix subtraction is not a common morphological process, either in general or in Frisian, assuming it in this particular case of name formation results in an insightful analysis. It differs from an alternative analysis, in terms of schwa deletion, that not only solves, but also creates problems. Hence, the advantages of that analysis do not outweigh its disadvantages. The analysis defended here also underlines the importance of paradigmatic relations in morphology, which can be formally expressed by means of sister schemas in Construction Morphology.
Open access
