What does “-cska” mean in Hungarian?

A csík is a stripe. A csíkocska is a little stripe — and the -ka / -ke / -cska / -cske ending that made it is something Hungarian speakers reach for constantly. It shrinks the thing, but it also softens the whole sentence: a csíkocska on the edge of your phone sounds harmless, almost fond, in a way that “a stripe” never could.

It turns up everywhere: kutya → kutyus / kutyuska (doggy), kávé → kávécska, sör → sörcske, ház → házikó, könyv → könyvecske. It builds first names as well — Sándor becomes Sanyi and then Sanyika — which is why a grown man introducing himself with a -ka ending reads as either sweet or comic. Those lines on your phone, incidentally, are breaks in the metal frame that separate the antennas, a design that arrived with the iPhone 4 in 2010.