Baguette is genuinely a diminutive, but the French is a loanword from Italian bacchetta “little stick,” from bacchio “stick.”
Funnily enough, “bacteria” also means “little stick” due to the shape of the first ones seen under a microscope, and the word shares the same etymological root (reconstructed as *bak- in proto-Indo-European), but in Greek – bakterion is a little staff, baktron is a staff or stick without the diminutive.
Baguette is genuinely a diminutive, but the French is a loanword from Italian bacchetta “little stick,” from bacchio “stick.”
Funnily enough, “bacteria” also means “little stick” due to the shape of the first ones seen under a microscope, and the word shares the same etymological root (reconstructed as *bak- in proto-Indo-European), but in Greek – bakterion is a little staff, baktron is a staff or stick without the diminutive.
So Bacteria indeed implies the existence of Baktron
“Yeah, I got a staff infection.”