HEGE-TALE (a weak-kneed coward) and Linguistic Intuition

A TALE tale to tell.

へげたれ /he-ge-ta-le/ is a dialect of west of Japan, and if you are not from that region you would probably have no idea what it means. HEGETALE means a weak-kneed coward.

My great grandfather who was from Shingu, the west part of Japan, wrote this word in his private letter and also drew a little picture of a HEGETALE on the side of the sheet. I love the sound and the picture of this word so much that the word always shows up on my PC as a screen saver.

Now, when a person sees the word HEGETALE on my PC screen, usually they would ask me,
"What does HEGETALE mean?"
And I would tell them the meaning. "It means a weak-kneed coward."

However, Roki, my blog partner, when he saw this word on my PC screen, gave a very different question that nobody had given me.

"What does HEGE mean?"

I was wild with fascination.
He asked only about the HEGE bit, not the TALE bit, and it was perfectly reasonable way to break up the word. I thought,
 "Now! Here is a person who has a very sharp linguistic intuition!"

-TALE is an suffix which is roughly equivalent to -ling as in "duckling"and "changeling" (and although we do not see these words so often without their suffix,  "darling" is "dar (dear) + ling" and "sibling" is "sib + ling") . The Japanese suffix -TALE functions similar to the English suffix -ling, is added to an adjective or a noun to mean a person carrying that characteristics, adding a diminutive sense.

Here are some common Japanese words with -TALE suffix.
ばかたれ BAKA -TALE  : a thick-witted daft
はなたれ HANA -TALE  : a snotty-nosed kid
しみったれ SHIMIT -TALE : a stingy miser

As you can see, the words with -TALE ending tend to be light insults, and used quite casually in conversation. So people are familiar with this suffix -TALE, but strangely nobody, except for Roki, had asked me the meaning of the word breaking it up into root and suffix.

My blog partner, with his very sharp linguistic intuition, is a barefooted philologist.