Unfortunately, I'm not a student of lingustics so I have little knowledge of Polish works on morphological history of the Polish language. I have one book at home, but there's little about these things there.I understand. A linguist trying to reconstruct old structures is usually hindered by a paucity of resources.
Yes, we employ vowels to make those of course. But there are more ways than one to do that and I am not sure about their roots' being identical.
Examples:
lasek = las + ek (little wood, las = wood) masculine
piąstka = piąst + ka (little fist, pięść = fist) feminine
sitko = sit + ko (little sieve, sito = sieve) neuter
Wow! Apparently the vowels can occur either before or after the morpheme.
The above seem all the same to me. Below go examples of the -ik/-yk suffix, which could be different historically from them:
planik = plan + ik (little plan, plan = plan) masculine, maybe a little neological, but certainly natural
Yes, because as it seems plan is originally Latin. It might have been borrowed from English though; just guessing!
Such unusual structures sound humorous in Farsi.
piecyk = piec + yk (little oven, piec = oven) masculine
I'm having problems coming up with feminine and neuter counterparts right now.</div>As you know very well, linguistic gender became obsolete in Persian long ago, I think in the Middle Persian.