时髦英语口语词汇讲解第18期:Familiarity marker perhaps

Have you noticed how common the 'y' ('ie') ending is in English as a sort of colloquial suffix?
不知道你注意到没有？“y”(小写的y发音读作i)经常出现在英语的词末，几乎可以说它已经成为了一个口语后缀。

A familiarity marker perhaps is a better way of talking about it.
也许我们更应该称之为“亲昵词（昵称）”。

You talk about the telly - it's a television.
电视机叫telly而不是television。

You talk about your auntie - instead of your aunt.
我们把阿姨叫做auntie而不是aunt。

Of course, there's mummy and daddy as well.
当然，还有咱们常用的mummy和daddy。

People from Australia are Aussies as well as Australians, and of course in proper names you talk about Charles and Charlie, or Susan and Susie. Very very common suffix.
我们在把澳大利亚人称为Australians 的同时也称其为Aussies。还有，在遇到专有名词的时候，Charles 变成了Charlie，Susan变成了Susie。这些都是十分常见的后缀。

Not surprising then to find that new words every now and then come into the language which use it, and the one that has attracted a lot of interest recently is 'luvvy' and 'luvvies' - l-u-v-v-y and l-u-v-v-i-e-s.
那么如此一来，在英语中不时地出现像这一类的新词就不足以让人感到奇怪了。最近比较吸引大众注意力的是这个词：Luvvy或者luvvies——l-u-v-v-y 或是l-u-v-v-i-e-s。

Especially in Britain, it's a kind of mockery for actors and actresses, considered to be rather affected actors, you know, who turn up and call each other 'darling' all the time and go 'mwah' at each other, when they're kissing each other, and people say "oh, listen to those luvvies talking, those poor luvvies - there's lots of luvvy talk going on" - l-u-v-v-y.
特别是在英国，这个词是对演员一种嘲笑，你知道的，他们矫情得厉害，在镜头里老是“亲爱的” “宝贝儿” 个不停，当他们亲亲我我的时候，观众会咕哝道“瞧这些矫情的鸟儿，又在你浓我浓了，哪有这么多话说的嘛？”对了，就是这个词“l-u-v-v-y”（亲爱的）。

Now what's interesting is it's the spelling that's made this word so new, because there already was a word 'lovey' in the language, going back right to the 1960s, spelt l-o-v-e-y.
有趣的是，这个词新就新在它的写法比较新。因为实际上在20世纪60年代，英语中已经出现过一个有相同语义的词：“lovey”。

It's a much older term of endearment.
“lovey”是个已经由来已久的昵称词。

I might say "oh, come on, lovey!" meaning ...you might hear from a bus conductor for instance, and it refers simply to you know, 'my dear', and it could be to a man or a woman, more usually to a woman.
我们可以这样用“拜托，亲爱的！”……意思是……假如你从一个巴士售票员口中听到这句话，它只单纯地表示——“亲爱的”，可以是对男士说也可以是对女士说，当然，大多数情况下只针对对女性用这个词。

So, what we've got is a new word 'luvvy' with a different spelling from the old word 'lovey' - now that doesn't happen very often in language change.
也就是说，luvvy来自lovey，同义不同形而已——这种现象在语言变化中并不常见。