Diminutives

Atete Benzinge, Wahome Mutai, Trey Garner and Zawadi Nyachae will compete in MX50 Class where the diminutives are expected to add some zest to the occasion held annually in Kenya and Uganda.

An extension common to diminutives in many languages is approximation and resemblance (having a 'little bit' of some characteristic, like -y or -ish in English).

Consequently, these dialects also make grammatical use of umlaut to form plurals and diminutives, much as most other modern Germanic languages do.

Edward did not seem to suit me and the diminutives Ted or Ned were even less appropriate.

In Dutch, singulative forms of collective nouns are occasionally made by diminutives: snoep "sweets, candy" → snoepje "sweet, piece of candy".

In northern France, other terms for this type of dance included "ronde" and its diminutives "rondet", "rondel", and "rondelet" from which the more modern music term "rondeau" derives.

Semantic motivation The ki-/vi- class historically consisted of two separate genders, artefacts (Bantu class 7/8, utensils and hand tools mostly) and diminutives (Bantu class 12), which were conflated at a stage ancestral to Swahili.

These and the postalveolar sounds are typical of diminutives, which are used frequently in child language and motherese (mainly to show affection rather than size).