Despre sufixul -isim în limba română: sincronie și diacronie

Abstract

This article, which is part of a larger collective project on Romanian suffixation at the Romanian Academy’s “Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics under Blanca Croitor’s coordination, puts forth a both diachronic, and synchronic presentation of the suffix -isim (and its alternate/etymological spellings -issim, -isimo and -issimo) in Romanian. While at first it
was present in words loaned mostly from Italian (sometimes doubled by scholarly Latin loans), the suffix -isim came to be affixed also to typical Romanian words. Its frequency and productivity have never been too extended, as proved by the examples taken from the literature (mostly dictionaries) and corpora (with examples taken with the use of RoTenTen21/Sketch Engine). In
terms of style and register, this suffix has always been used in specialised languages (e.g., music, military, religion), with most recent uses also in (or imitating) slang, irony or sarcasm.