Encountered a while back via Facebook, this YouTube video:
[text:] Los Futbolitos, es un dúo de youtubers dominicanos, compuesto por Ángelo Valdés, alias “Will” y Vincent Peréz, en el que se dedican a hacer videos sobre fútbol y debatiendo sobre esto ultimo. [Valdés and Peréz make videos about soccer / football and debate about it]
So: we’ve got the noun (el) futbolito ‘football / soccer guy’, a derivative of (el) fútbol ‘football, soccer’, with the diminutive suffix –it-; immediately, there’s the question of how this noun gets this sense.
And I note that Spanish has another noun (el) futbolito ‘foosball’ — which, startlingly, is also alluded to in the photo: that’s a foosball game just under the title. How does this noun get its sense?
And then that Spanish has another derived noun denoting foosball: (el) futbolín, with another diminutive suffix, -ín (for the musically inclined reader, it’s the Spanish counterpart of Italian –ín-: from Don Giovanni, Se vuol ballare, signor Contino ‘if you want to dance, my little count, …’)
Now: this is very complex (and there’s more), but not at all chaotic. It’s just the speakers of a language deploying a few formal resources to cover a wide range of meaningful effects — speakers at different places and times, in different contexts, with different purposes, so there’s also plenty of intricate variation going on as well. But that’s just the way language use works. In fact, I’m inclined to look at suites of facts like these with a sense of genuine awe, and delight as well. In a word (a dated word, but mine): COOL.
Uses of diminutive morphology. A compact survey, exemplified with Spanish diminutive –it-:
— 1 the central sense is smallness. futbolito could be used to refer merely to a small soccer ball (though it hasn’t been conventionalized in this sense)
— 2 then, taking a positive view of smallness, we get the senses of intimacy or endearment. futbolito could be used to refer to your very special soccer ball, or to a particularly adorable one (with, say, the image of a smiling Pelé on it), though again, not conventionalized in such senses
— 3 then, taking a negative view of smallness, we get the senses of weakness, deficiency, childishness. futbolito could be used to refer to a crappy soccer ball, or one that won’t inflate properly, though again, not conventionalized in such senses
— 4 then, implicating falling short, the sense of approximation — seen in futbolito ‘foosball’, which is a sort-of soccer game; from NOAD:
noun foosball: mainly North American English a tabletop version of soccer in which players turn rods fixed on top of a playing box and attached to miniature figures of players, in order to flick the ball and strike it toward the goal.
— 5 or finally, bleaching to metonymy, the senses of mere association or aboutness — seen in the item we came in with, futbolito ‘soccer guy, someone who follows soccer and writes about it’
And then there’s –ín. As in approximative futbolín ‘foosball’. My sources tell me that the suffix is from northern Spain, especially Asturias and León, where it forms diminutives of nouns, often nouns that already have a diminutive suffix (double diminutives are not at all uncommon), as in:
chiquito ‘little boy’ + -ín → chiquitín ‘very young boy’
poquito ‘little bit’ + -ín → poquitín ‘tiny bit’
(The Dominican Los Futbolitos might not be familiar with futbolín as an alternative to their foosball word futbolito. Or they might; words get passed around.)
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