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ArchivesRe: Liemertje
in reply to a message by Mary R.
Which Wiki are you referring to? Wikipedia or Wiktionary? A direct link to your source would have been even more helpful.
Yes, that was immediately obvious, I'm sorry to say. For one, you clearly lack basic knowledge of Dutch diminutive suffixes. If you had, you would have known that -tje is the Dutch diminutive suffix here:
• -tje: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tje (in English)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diminutives_by_language#Dutch (in English)
-mer- has nothing whatsoever to do with the diminutive aspect of the example you provided, namely Amsterdammertje. In Dutch, an Amsterdammer is a person who lives (preferably born and raised) in Amsterdam. Just like a New Yorker is a person from New York. So, Amsterdammertje is just a diminutive that basically means "little Amsterdammer". The New York equivalent would probably be New Yorkie, I imagine.
I have never seen Amsterdammertje used for adult inhabitants of Amsterdam, by the way. It must be exclusively used for children, as the word already sounds infantile on its own. I imagine the same applies to New Yorkie: have you ever heard an adult New Yorker refer to themselves as such, or to other adult New Yorkers?
Anyway, this is the Name Facts board and guesswork of the kind you were doing is not helpful here. Yes, making guesses is inescapable sometimes, but the person making them should at least have *some* basic knowledge of the subject they're commenting on, so that their guesses will at least be educated guesses. Yours was basically just invented, due to taking the meaning too literally and then trying to make the original word fit that meaning... by chopping the original word into parts and then assigning (by guessing) one of the parts to a part of the stated meaning. That's not a scientific way of handling the problem, at least not when you have no basic knowledge of the source language.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
Yes, that was immediately obvious, I'm sorry to say. For one, you clearly lack basic knowledge of Dutch diminutive suffixes. If you had, you would have known that -tje is the Dutch diminutive suffix here:
• -tje: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tje (in English)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diminutives_by_language#Dutch (in English)
-mer- has nothing whatsoever to do with the diminutive aspect of the example you provided, namely Amsterdammertje. In Dutch, an Amsterdammer is a person who lives (preferably born and raised) in Amsterdam. Just like a New Yorker is a person from New York. So, Amsterdammertje is just a diminutive that basically means "little Amsterdammer". The New York equivalent would probably be New Yorkie, I imagine.
I have never seen Amsterdammertje used for adult inhabitants of Amsterdam, by the way. It must be exclusively used for children, as the word already sounds infantile on its own. I imagine the same applies to New Yorkie: have you ever heard an adult New Yorker refer to themselves as such, or to other adult New Yorkers?
Anyway, this is the Name Facts board and guesswork of the kind you were doing is not helpful here. Yes, making guesses is inescapable sometimes, but the person making them should at least have *some* basic knowledge of the subject they're commenting on, so that their guesses will at least be educated guesses. Yours was basically just invented, due to taking the meaning too literally and then trying to make the original word fit that meaning... by chopping the original word into parts and then assigning (by guessing) one of the parts to a part of the stated meaning. That's not a scientific way of handling the problem, at least not when you have no basic knowledge of the source language.
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Replies
This is such a rude comment. Unfortunate we have people with this attitude on this website.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdammertje
That was that funny thing
That was that funny thing
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