Hypocorism. The formation of pet names, which in America are called nicknames and in France hypocorisms, was originally developed for the purpose of having a form of a name to use in familiar circumstances. Such a spelling was therefore at first a variant form, but over time some of them have come to be considered names in their own right. Hypocorisms may be divided into two classes: those that are formed by 1) altering the pronunciation of the full form of the name in certain natural ways (phonological alteration), and 2) attaching a particular derivational suffix (possibly a prefix or infix, but usually a diminutive) to the full form of the name(morphological affixation).
Figures 14 and 15 give hypocorisms for a couple of common English given names. Like many polysyllable names, David may be shortened to the first syllable. The single syllable thus left may in some cases serve as a simple hypocorism, as it is with Dave. Abigail serves as an example of a name where procope leaves us with just the last syllable. In this case, however, the single syllable left by truncation, “Abb,” cannot serve as a hypocorism. The short form, whether or not in use, becomes the stem to which the diminutive suffix is added, thus marking it specifically as a hypocorism. In the case of Abigail, the procope may be respelled as Gale, homophonic with the word for a storm at sea.
The functions that form hypocorisms cannot produce any appreciable distance between them and the formal spelling. The chain of operations involved (T1 possibly followed by Ea) must assign a negligible score to the changes it performs.
