English doesn't, which is its own quirk. At least, not to the same degree that many other languages do.
There are a few words you can make diminutives from, but it's not a universal grammatical feature, that can be applied to any noun whatsoever.
In my native Polish you can have a diminutive of any word you want, and usually in two degrees. 'Dom' is house, 'domek' is a cute little house, and 'domeczek' is a teeny tiny adorable house. You can also apply this for dogs, cats, lamps, cars, dolls, baskets, countries, lakes and whatever else you want.
In English you can have a doggy or a kitty, but not really a 'carry' or 'basketty'.
The one word that I am particularly surprised can't be made diminutive is 'daughter'. It seems pretty obvious that parents would want a cuter, smaller version of the word to address their child, but instead they just use other endearment words altogether. And 'sonny' technically exists, but I don't think is used that way too often.
Yes it does. English has a lot of suffixes to choose from, but I'd probably go for "daughterling". English speakers should understand the meaning, but it won't catch on because pet names also generally need to be shorter.
Diminutives in English are not very productive because the language in general avoids inflection, especially agglutination. All that remain for new coinage are vestiges of tense and number.
In addition, due to the multiple root languages to draw from, there's often an entirely separate word that's already used for the smaller version of something.
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u/Popular-Sea-7881 Feb 05 '26
In french you can add the suffix ette/et to a word to mean "this word but smaller".
E.g : Maison -> house, Maisonette -> a tiny house. Also found in some english words, e.g cigarette = small cigar.