Ćwarmin: Diminutives and Augmentatives

Ćwarmin has very little prefixing morphology, but some does exist. The diminutives and augmentatives are formed this way. Ćwarmin uses diminutives and augmentatives extensively, and quite weird idiomatic constructions appear.

gar-/yər-, wor-/ver-, har-/hər-, ka:-, ron- : augmentative, "big"

sir-/sur-, cir-/cur-, mir-/mur-, dži-, lis-: diminutive, "small"

Note that sir- is much preferred for diminutives. Sometimes, this ignores vowel harmony - curkapar, sirkapar, 'small shelter'. However, it sometimes enforces front harmony onto lexical roots: sirkəpər: a village, 'small shelter'. More uncommon is vowel harmony switching to back harmony, but it does happen.

Lis- and har-/hər- are the 'weakest' of these, i.e. the deviation from average size or intensity is not usually very large when those are used. However, they are also the most 'emotionally positive' ones, and prefixing lis- to a female name or har-/ər- to a male name is done as a form of endearment. (A gender difference is that men usually do not use har-/ər- about other people, whereas females use both lis- and har-/ər- quite commonly.) For children, both dži- and lis- are common; ron- is sometimes used in a playful sense with children.

Combining prefixes is common:

verhərgimin : the largest moderately large fish, a rather large fish
curworkar : big small who? 'whatshisface', or 'a person whose existence is under doubt'.
cirverter : big small what? 'a thing whose existence is under doubt', or 'whatchamacallit'
garkaaćwurga = very huge storm
 curronguska = tiny big chief, a demeaning term for a person who thinks he is more important than he is
(dži)ronguska = little big chief (to a kid, indicating he's being bossy) 

gar-/yər-, wor-/ver- also serve to intensify verbs and adjectives, and mir-/mur- serve to weaken them. However, these should not be mistaken for comparatives or superlatives. Often, the intensifying prefix may go on a particularly salient noun or adjective in the same noun phrase even if another noun or adjective is the actually intense thing, i.e.

samar ver-širməs
fast big-ship
very fast ship, fast big ship

wor-samar širmes
very fast ship 

Intonation serves to distinguish the two; in the case that the prefix really intensifies a preceding word, the first syllable generally ascends, with the next syllable dropping a fair bit. If it intensifies the word on which it is prefixed, the first syllable of the root generally ascends a bit.

Finally, the plural indefinite in combination with the augmentative indicates 'X and things associated with X'.