In English, if you want to emphasise the smallness of something, you might chain together a few ‘very’s. Like, hey, look at this cute little cat. It is very, very, very small. You could also go the elongation route — “this cat is sooooo small.” That’s a little bit cuter, and a touch more affectionate.
You can do the same in Spanish. “Muy, muy, muy pequeño,” or “muuuuuy pequeño.”
Then there’re the ‘diminutive’ forms of words — when you modify the word to convey the smallness of the subject.
In English, diminutives are all over the place, because, as the James Nicoll quote goes: “English [pursues] other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and [rifle] their pockets for new vocabulary.” Most English diminutives are loaned suffixes that just became lexicalised, their roots unknown to most.
There are some fun ones. In the UK, tabloid rags (shitty gossip newspapers) often coin nicknames for the celebrities they stalk by clipping their surnames to the first syllable and adding an ‘s’, as in ‘Wills’ (monarch Prince William) or ‘Becks’ (footballer David Beckham).
Sidenote (because, sometimes, I have to give my native tongue its dues before fawning over Spanish): David Beckham is married to Victoria Beckham (née Adams), who, as a member of the Spice Girls, was nicknamed ‘Posh Spice’, so her and David, as a celebrity couple, came to be dubbed ‘Posh and Becks’. This couple name became Cockney rhyming slang for ‘sex’ (a la ‘apples and pears’ for ‘stairs’, or ‘Adam and Eve it’ for ‘believe it’, though not as commonly-used). Anyway, back to diminutives.
I think the closest thing English has to a universally-applicable diminutive suffix is ‘ish’, but this is mostly used for adjectives (“this colour is yellow-ish”) or approximations (“there are fifty-ish people at this party”).
Meanwhile, in Spanish…
The year I started visiting Kassandra in México was also, it just so happens, the year Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee dropped the song ‘Despacito’, which is often credited as the starting point for Latin American music’s most consistent and saturated years-long domination of global culture.
In 2017 and 2018, you couldn’t go an hour without hearing ‘Despacito’, so, naturally, I asked Kass what the song was about, and she explained that ‘despacito’ means ‘slowly’, but in a gentle, soft, sexy kinda way. The lyrics describe sensual, romantic sex.
‘Despacio’ would just mean ‘slowly’, like, walking slowly, but ‘despacito’? That’s the passionate, seductive cousin of ‘slowly’. Thus, the power of ‘ito’.
Unlike ‘ish’, though, ‘ito’ — or ‘ita’ for ‘feminine’ words — isn’t limited to adjectives. It’s boundless. I’m pretty sure you can add it to literally any word.
Going back to the ‘cat’ example: ‘cat’ would be ‘gata’ (feminine) or ‘gato’ (masculine) in Spanish. Wanna indicate that the cat is small? ‘Gatito’.
Dog? Perro. Little dog? Perrito. Bird? Pajaro. Little bird? Pajarito. A little bit? Un poco. A very little, very small bit? Un poquito.
Let’s focus on ‘un poquito’ for a sec, because this is where the real cuteness starts to unfold, and it’s a little hard to get across the full effect in text. Just imagine you’re getting tacos with friends, and you want to have a little bite of someone else’s, just to try what they ordered.
At a base level, you might ask, “¿Puedo tener un poco de tu taco?” — “can I have a little bit of your taco?” But you can also be way more cute with it, and ask for “un poquito de tu taquito.” This doesn’t mean the taco is small. It’s just an affectionate, silly little way of saying ‘taco’.
So, cool, you can throw ‘ito’ or ‘ita’ onto any word. But get this: you can STACK the diminutive. If you see a cat, and it’s the absolute silliest little guy you’ve ever seen, just a tiny puff of fluff, you can refer to it as a ‘gatitito’, or even a ‘gatititititito’.
You can chain infinite ‘ito’s together, until such a point that you begin annoying people and alienating your friends.