Of guerrillas and how femininity was diminutised

The present number of The East African — our regional sister newspaper — informs us in a headline that “Even the toughest of the guerillas can’t fight their best friends”.

Note that here guerilla is spelt with a single “r”. The assumption, probably, is that the choice of spelling is optional.

Not really. As I have warned here many times, both “double r” and “double l” are essential ingredients of the word guerrilla – “double r” because it is entrenched in the Latin word guerrum, from which English has long ago borrowed it, through the French guerre – meaning “war”.

The word guerrilla, borrowed through the Spanish guerrillero (feminine guerrillera), refers both to a bush war — of the kind that Yoweri Museveni once waged against Kampala’s Idi Amin regime — and to any man or woman involved in such informal skirmishing against a recognised regime.

The word guerrum is familiar to political science students in the Latin phrase guerrum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”) by which Thomas Hobbes once famously warned of a time when — unless society changed its ways — life might become nasty, brutish and short.

REDUCTION

For its part, “double l” is a common way in which all Romance languages — such “daughters” of Latin as French, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian and Spanish — either diminutise or feminise certain nouns. Diminution is reduction in real or only ideal size, volume, intensity, importance or priority.

In grammar, then, the adjective diminutive often refers to a suffix added to a word either to convey the meaning of “small” or “small-scale” or to express fondness and affection. French, for instance, appends -ille or -ette to diminutise a word or express affection.

But in this alleged “affection”, the sensitive observer immediately recognises the male chauvinist habit in all patriarchal societies of identifying “femaleness” with physical as well as moral and mental “littleness”.

Mignonette, for instance — which refers to a plant with spikes of fragrant greenish-white flowers — got its name by adding an ette to the French word mignon, meaning “dainty” and “well-done”. But the “min” in diminution is the same word as the mini used in reducing the size of anything, from mini-skirts and minibuses to miniatures.

BELITTLING

The preposition minus means “less”; the adjectives minute and minuscule mean “extremely small”; and the noun minutiae refers to small details, trifles. All these words have the same etymological root as minimum (noun), minimise (verb) and minimal (adjective).

In guerrilla, then, the “illa” suffix indicates that the guerre in point is small-scale or informal or sporadic or, often, inconsequential. As with the Luo word element nya – which gives us the word nyako (“girl”), the French ille and ette also help both to femininise and to belittle.

In its modern form — like all Western European languages — Dholuo has developed in a rigidly patriarchal climate. That is why to diminutise is the same process as to feminise.

That is why the nya in nyathi (“child”) is the same as the nya in nyako (“girl”, “small woman”) and the nya in nyaguok (“puppy”, “small dog”).

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