A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment , and sometimes to derogatorily belittle something or someone. A diminutive form ( abbreviated DIM ) is a word-formation device used to express such meanings. A double diminutive is a diminutive form with two diminutive suffixes rather than one.
33-598: Ampelmännchen ( German: [ˈampl̩ˌmɛnçən] ; literally 'little traffic light man', diminutive of Ampelmann [ampl̩ˈman] ) is the symbol shown on pedestrian signals in Germany. Prior to German reunification in 1990, the two German states had different forms for the Ampelmännchen , with a generic human figure in West Germany , and a generally "male" figure wearing
66-705: A grammatical diminutive to nouns , a few – including Slovak, Dutch , Spanish , Romanian , Latin , Polish , Bulgarian , Czech , Russian and Estonian – also use it for adjectives (in Polish: słodki → słodziutki → słodziuteńki ) and even other parts of speech (Ukrainian спати → спатки → спатоньки — to sleep or Slovak spať → spinkať → spinuškať — to sleep, bežať → bežkať — to run). Diminutives in isolating languages may grammaticalize strategies other than suffixes or prefixes. In Mandarin Chinese , for example, other than
99-629: A hat in the East . The Ampelmännchen is a beloved symbol in former East Germany , "enjoy[ing] the privileged status of being one of the few features of East Germany to have survived the end of the Iron Curtain with his popularity unscathed". After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Ampelmännchen acquired cult status and became a popular souvenir item in the tourism business. The first traffic lights at pedestrian crossings were erected in
132-481: A virtual mascot for the East German nostalgia movement, known as Ostalgie . The protests were successful, and the Ampelmännchen returned to pedestrian crossings. They can now also be seen in some western districts of Berlin. Some western German cities such as Saarbrücken and Heidelberg have since adopted the design for some intersections. Peter Becker, marshal of Saarbrücken, explained that lights of
165-441: Is made for five years, the rights can be cancelled. The court ruled in 2006 that Rossberg's right to use the Ampelmännchen as a marketing brand had largely lapsed and had passed back into the public domain. Rossberg only retained the right to use the symbol to market liqueur, and may no longer use the logo on beer and T-shirts. The court case was later seen by some as part of the cultural and political struggle between residents of
198-530: Is more affectionate. Examples for a double diminutive having two diminutive suffixes are in Polish dzwon → dzwonek → dzwoneczek or Italian casa → casetta → casettina ). In English, the alteration of meaning is often conveyed through clipping , making the words shorter and more colloquial . Diminutives formed by adding affixes in other languages are often longer and (as colloquial) not necessarily understood. While many languages apply
231-608: The Junge Welt publishing company, games with the Ampelmännchen were developed. Ampelmännchen stories were developed for radio broadcasts. Partly animated Ampelmännchen stories with the name Stiefelchen und Kompaßkalle were broadcast once a month as part of the East German children's bedtime television programme Sandmännchen , which had one of the largest viewing audiences in East Germany. The animated Ampelmännchen stories raised international interest, and
264-545: The Ampelmännchen design into products and had an assortment of over forty Ampelmännchen souvenir products in 2004, reportedly earning €2 million yearly. In the meantime, east German businessman Joachim Rossberg had also used the distinctive traffic symbol as a logo, and claimed to make €50,000 per year from merchandise. Heckhausen appealed to a Leipzig court in 2005 over the marketing rights, suing Rossberg for failing at making full use of his marketing rights; German legislature rules state that if no use of marketing rights
297-723: The Ampelmännchen during his visits to East Berlin in the 1980s. When he was looking for new design possibilities in 1995, he had the idea to collect dismantled Ampelmännchen and build lamps. But he had difficulty finding old Ampelmännchen and eventually contacted the former VEB Signaltechnik (now Signaltechnik Roßberg GmbH ) regarding their excess stock. The company was still producing Ampelmännchen , and liked Heckhausen's marketing ideas. The public embraced Heckhausen's first six lamp models. Local newspapers published full-page articles, followed by articles in national newspapers and designer magazines. The successful German daily soap opera Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten used
330-451: The Ampelmännchen lamp in their coffeehouse set. Designer Karl Peglau explained the public reaction in 1997: It is presumably their special, almost indescribable aura of human snugness and warmth, when humans are comfortably touched by this traffic symbol figure and find a piece of honest historical identification, giving the Ampelmännchen the right to represent a positive aspect of a failed social order. The Ampelmännchen became
363-444: The Ampelmännchen per his suggestions. The initial concept envisioned the Ampelmännchen to have fingers, but this idea was dropped due to technical difficulties with the illumination. However, the man's "perky", "cheerful" and potentially " petit bourgeois " hat – inspired by a summer photo of Erich Honecker in a straw hat – was retained, to Peglau's surprise. The prototypes of the Ampelmännchen traffic lights were built at
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#1732779746866396-559: The VEB -Leuchtenbau Berlin. The Ampelmännchen was officially introduced on 13 October 1961 in Berlin, at which time the media attention and public interest focused on the new traffic lights, not the symbols. The first Ampelmännchen were produced as cheap decals. Beginning in 1973, the Ampelmännchen traffic lights were produced at VEB Signaltechnik Wildenfels and privately owned artisan shops. Decades later, Daniel Meuren of
429-589: The 1950s, and many countries developed different designs (which were eventually standardised). At that time, traffic lights were the same for cars, bicycles and pedestrians. The East Berlin Ampelmännchen was created in 1961 by traffic psychologist Karl Peglau (1927–2009) as part of a proposal for a new traffic lights layout. Peglau criticised the fact that the standard colours of the traffic lights (red, yellow, green) did not provide for road users who were unable to differentiate between colours (ten percent of
462-744: The Czech festival for road safety education films awarded Stiefelchen und Kompaßkalle the Special Award by the Jury and the Main Prize for Overall Accomplishments in 1984. Following the German reunification in 1990, there were attempts to standardise all traffic signs to the West German forms. East German street signs and traffic signs were dismantled and replaced because of differing fonts in
495-496: The East German Ampelmännchen have greater signal strength than West German traffic lights, and "in our experience people react better to the East German Ampelmännchen than the West German ones." In Heidelberg, however, a government department asked the city to stop the installation of more East German Ampelmännchen , citing standards in road traffic regulations. Heckhausen continued to incorporate
528-465: The East German era. The paper was allegedly sold for a symbolic price of 1 Mark to a West Berlin publishing house in 1991. It was relaunched in 1994, after German reunification and the effective dissolution of the FDJ , as Germany's most left-wing daily newspaper. The new editorial team included both East and West German authors of different left factions. In 1997, a schism between these two camps led to
561-774: The art collective Ztohoven ("(The way) Out of shit") changed some pedestrian traffic lights in the daylight hours of 8 April 2007 in five hours work, with a ladder and wearing red overalls . He used different motifs, including men and women (e.g. drinking, urinating). On 11 May 2015, before the Life Ball and the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna , the city changed some traffic lights to " Ampelpärchen "; these are designs with homo- and heterosexual couples, hugging or holding hands. In June 2015, Salzburg (at Staatsbrücke) and Linz (at Mozartkreuzung) followed suit with
594-407: The diminutive form is the augmentative . In some contexts, diminutives are also employed in a pejorative sense to denote that someone or something is weak or childish. For example, one of the last Western Roman emperors was Romulus Augustus , but his name was diminutivized to "Romulus Augustulus" to express his powerlessness. In many languages, diminutives are word forms that are formed from
627-477: The disabled. Peglau therefore resorted to images of a little man, his body forming shapes to indicate the appropriate action: The thick, outstretched arms of the front-facing red man form a pictorial barricade to signal "stop", while the sideways-facing green man with his pacing legs forms an arrow, signalling permission to "go ahead". The yellow light was abandoned because of the generally unhurried nature of pedestrian traffic. Peglau's secretary Anneliese Wegner drew
660-474: The early 1980s. The East German Ministry of the Interior had the idea to bring the two traffic light figures to life as speaking characters. The Ampelmännchen were introduced with much media publicity. They appeared in strip cartoons, also in situations without traffic lights. The red Ampelmännchen appeared in potentially dangerous environments, and the green Ampelmännchen gave advice. Together with
693-512: The eventual foundation of the weekly Jungle World , which since strongly denounced anti-Zionist views upheld by their former colleagues. The newspaper has been criticised by six of its own authors and others for not being sufficiently critical of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran in relation to their nuclear "ambitions". Junge Welt is published by Verlag 8. Mai GmbH. The cooperative Linke Presse Verlags-Förderungs und -Beteiligungsgenossenschaft (LPG) junge Welt e.G. began preparing to take over
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#1732779746866726-703: The female counterpart to the Ampelmännchen , the Ampelfrau , which was installed on some traffic lights in Zwickau , Dresden and Fürstenwalde . The Ampelfrau also appears at some traffic lights in Reykjavik , Iceland. In 2019, Fulda , a strongly Catholic city in Hesse, adopted Ampelmännchen designed to look like Saint Boniface , on the occasion of 1275th anniversary of the foundation of Fulda princely abbey. Roman Tic (a pseudonym playing with "romantic") of
759-447: The former two German countries. The East German education programmes featuring the Ampelmännchen vanished. This led to calls to save the East German Ampelmännchen as a part of the East German culture. The first solidarity campaigns for the Ampelmännchen took place in Berlin in early 1995. Markus Heckhausen, a graphic designer from the West German city of Tübingen and founder of Ampelmann GmbH in Berlin, had first noticed
792-705: The majority of the publishing house in 1997. The cooperative LPG junge Welt e.G. now owns the majority of Verlag 8. Mai GmbH. According to the Annual Report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution , "the national daily newspaper junge Welt is the most important printed medium in the left-wing extremist scene " in Germany. Junge Welt had an estimated print run of around 25,600–27,900 in 2017. Junge Welt unsuccessfully filed
825-415: The nominal prefix 小- xiǎo- and nominal suffixes -儿/-兒 -r and -子 -zi , reduplication is a productive strategy, e.g., 舅 → 舅舅 and 看 → 看看 . In formal Mandarin usage, the use of diminutives is relatively infrequent, as they tend to be considered to be rather colloquial than formal. Some Wu Chinese dialects use a tonal affix for nominal diminutives; that is, diminutives are formed by changing
858-644: The official newspaper of the Central Council (Zentralrat) of the Free German Youth (FDJ), the communist youth organisation, on 12 November 1947. With a daily circulation of 1.38 million, junge Welt had the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the German Democratic Republic , even higher than the official Communist party organ Neues Deutschland . The paper was published by Verlag Junge Welt GmbH during
891-509: The right to determine the version used. East Germans have changed the look of Ampelmännchen traffic lights as a joke since the early 1980s; this turned into media-effective efforts to call attention to the vanishing East German Ampelmännchen in the 1990s. The Ampelmännchen on several traffic lights in Erfurt were changed by modifying the template, showing Ampelmännchen carrying backpacks or cameras. In 2004, Joachim Rossberg invented
924-457: The root word by affixation . In most languages, diminutives can also be formed as multi-word constructions such as " Tiny Tim ", or "Little Dorrit". In most languages that form diminutives by affixation, this is a productive part of the language. For example, in Spanish gordo can be a nickname for someone who is overweight, and by adding an -ito suffix, it becomes gordito which
957-596: The same designs. However, in December 2015, a city traffic minister of the party FPÖ dismounted the privately sponsored faceplates, deeming them unnecessary. On 13 October 2017, Google celebrated the 56th anniversary of the Traffic Light Man with a Google Doodle . Diminutive Diminutives are often employed as nicknames and pet names when speaking to small children and when expressing extreme tenderness and intimacy to an adult. The opposite of
990-562: The tone of the word. Junge Welt Junge Welt (English: Young World , stylized in its logo as junge Welt ) is a German daily newspaper , published in Berlin . The jW describes itself as a left-wing and Marxist newspaper. German authorities categorize it as a far-left medium hostile to the constitutional order. junge Welt was first published on 12 February 1947 in the Soviet Sector of Berlin . The paper became
1023-565: The total population), and that the lights themselves were too small and too weak when competing against luminous advertising and sunlight. Peglau proposed retaining the three colours while introducing intuitive shapes for each coloured light. This idea received strong support from many sides, but Peglau's plans were doomed by the high costs involved in replacing existing traffic light infrastructure. Unlike motor traffic, pedestrian traffic has no constraints on age or health (physical or mental), and therefore must accommodate children, elderly people and
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1056-471: The two parts of the reunified country, in which the underdog East generally lost. Berlin started to modernize its traffic lights from using regular light bulbs to LED technology in early 2006, which promised better visibility and lower maintenance costs. There are three Ampelmännchen variations in modern-day Germany – the old East German version, the old West German version, and the pan-German Ampelmännchen introduced in 1992. Each German state holds
1089-402: The weekly German newsmagazine Der Spiegel described the Ampelmännchen as uniting "beauty with efficiency, charm with utility, [and] sociability with fulfilment of duties". The Ampelmännchen reminded others of a childlike figure with big head and short legs, or a religious leader. The Ampelmännchen proved so popular that it became part of road safety education for children in
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