Saturday, February 26, 2011

-kin

The suffix -kin seems to have a somewhat variable distribution across speakers. For some it appears to be a productive suffix that means "little" or "baby": if you have a wug, a wugkin would be a small or juvenile wug. For other speakers, like myself, -kin is not productive, and in fact I barely noticed the fact that it has any sort of smallish connotation until this was pointed out to me. How can this be the case for a single language like English? Because we're all exposed to differing dialects, registers, and ultimately, types and amounts of data. Someone growing up as an only child on a rural farm during the 13th century is certain to be exposed to less language that a child from a family of fourteen growing up in modern day New York. And even leaving aside such differences, we all hear slightly different corpora from slightly different speakers as we grow up. (This is, of course, the source of language change, especially when speaker communities have little interaction with each other.)

Perception also plays an important role. Words ending in -kin have a fairly fixed distribution in English. Despite what I said in the previous paragraph, I'd be surprised if words containing it varied significantly across regions, registers, or dialects (and of course this could be empirically tested). When I was acquiring English, I perceived the suffix as being rare enough that I did not generalize it to other forms, unlike very common suffixes like -er for 'one who...', e.g., farmer 'one who farms'. It also may be due to the fact that if you ask me for a word ending in -kin, the first one I go to is "munchkin", which is certainly not "a small munch". So why is this interesting? I find it interesting because it shows that even when exposed to (essentially) the same data, speakers will or won't generalize different patterns. Patterns that are pervasive in a language (75% seems to be the magic number in Artificial Language Learning tasks) are for the most part generalized by all speakers: everyone who speakers English has the suffix -er and is willing to use it on novel forms. Patterns that derive from a previously productive affix but are now opaque are almost never generalized: the prefix "with-" as in "withstand" indicating "against" is, I would wager, never used with novel forms. The interesting patterns are those that occur in a small but semi-regular subdomain of English, as with the Germanic "strong verb" pattern of strike/struck generalizing to sneak/snuck, or the case of -kin. (Firefox won't recognize "snuck", but it gets millions of ghits, including an entry on Dictionary.com.) Speakers have to decide when confronted with such data whether these cases are simply a handful of random exceptions, or if there is some regular pattern that applies to only a small subset of lexemes.

9 comments:

Chris said...

I'm familiar with babykins, but I can't come up with other examples. Do you have others?

Ryan Denzer-King said...

I actually had a very difficult time finding any examples, though I did come across "devilkin" and "elfkin". As someone who never acquired this as a productive suffix, that doesn't really surprise me, but I do find it very surprising that some people do generalize the suffix given the rarity of forms.

Chris Farina said...

In an effort to not plagiarize the OED too badly, it indicated that -kin entered Middle English as a productive suffix from other Germanic languages but was not present in Old English.

Some good examples include: napkin, bumkin, gherkin, ciderkin, pumpkin, tamkin, manikin, devilkin, godkin, ladykin; not to mention the earlier proper nouns: Jenkins, Perkins, Watkins, Wilkinson, Dickens, Dickinson, etc. [All examples lovingly stripped from the OED entry.]

Ben Trawick-Smith said...

Do you have any more info on "kin?" I would be interested to know if there were variables in terms of age that account for its usage. A very unscientific observation, but it strikes me as something of an antiquated type of neologism, so I wouldn't be surprised if older populations, regardless of region, used it more commonly as a productive suffix.

Ryan Denzer-King said...

I haven't actually done a survey to see what percentage of people have -kin as a productive suffix, but it would certainly be an interesting sociolinguistic study. Might be a job for my Linguistics Research on Facebook group.

Erik Zyman Carrasco said...

Just to be perverse, I have jokingly used napkin to mean ‘a short nap’.

Julie said...

As a child I read "Heidi" many times. In translation,
the grandmother always calls Peter "Peterkin." I always wondered why the translator didn't choose "Petey" or the like.

CuriousAll-PurposeLinguist said...

The productivity of this morpheme is immense within the English language as pointed out by Ryan D.-K. and Chris F. I think its a great idea, Ben, to find its whereabouts as far back as possible, maybe as far back as the reconstructed, hypothetical Proto-Indo-European. As far as I have learned and researched, the PIE morpheme *gen- can bifurcate with two meanings 'birth, origin' and 'tribe, stock, nation, type.' Words deriving with the first meaning are genetic, genesis, genus,genuine, and even androgen, estrogen, eugenic, and hydrogen. The second meaning helps us derive words like generic, generation, progenitor, gentile, genre, gender, genotyp(ical), and indigenous. Ok, now that we have this, we can move on to the Grimm's law application on this morpheme which gives us something like *kVn- and more readily *kin- for Germanic. So for words like devilkin, godkin,ladykin, elfkin, and kinfolk as well as last names mentioned by Chris F. like Jenkins, Perkins, Watkins and the like, we could assume that -kin has the meaning 'related to, of relation with.' A word like babykins is one whose meaning is more obscure, maybe related to the 'birth, origin' meaning of this word which productively becomes 'baby, small'(?) in English. [word lists for the morphemic root *gen-, and its derivation to the morpheme -kin via Grimm's come from English Words: History and Structure, by Minkova and Stockwell, p. 63 & 145]

Alex Remington said...

My mother used to use "-kins" slightly productively when I was much younger -- in particular, "nappykins" meant a nap. Yet "nappy" meant a napkin. This always confused me.