Calque

Types

One system classifies calques into five groups. This terminology is not universal:

• Phraseological calques: idiomatic phrases are translated word for word. For example, "it goes without saying" calques the French ça va sans dire.
• Syntactic calques: syntactic functions or constructions of the source language are imitated in the target language, in violation of their meaning. For example, the use of "by" instead of "with" in the phrase "fine by me" is thought to have come from Yiddish yi, namely from the 1930s Yiddish Broadway musical song title Bei Mir Bistu Shein, .
• Loan-translations: words are translated morpheme by morpheme, or component by component, into another language.
• Semantic calques (also known as semantic loans): additional meanings of the source word are transferred to the word with the same primary meaning in the target language. As described below, the "computer mouse" was named in English for its resemblance to the animal; many other languages have extended their own native word for "mouse" to include the computer mouse.
• Morphological calques: the inflection of a word is transferred. Some authors call this a morpheme-by-morpheme translation.

Some linguists refer to a phonological calque, in which the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language. For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word (), which literally means "to arrive (as fast) as thunder".

Partial

Partial calques Loan blend Loanblend Partial calques, or loan blends, translate some parts of a compound but not others. For example, the name of the Irish digital television service Saorview is a partial calque of that of the UK service "Freeview", translating the first half of the word from English to Irish but leaving the second half unchanged. Other examples include "liverwurst" (

Semantic

The computer mouse was named in English for its resemblance to the animal. Many other languages use their word for mouse for the computer mouse, sometimes using a diminutive or, in Chinese, adding the word cursor (标), making shǔbiāo 'mouse cursor' (). Another example is the Spanish word ratón that means both the animal and the computer mouse.

Examples

Main article: List of calques

The common English phrase "flea market" is a loan translation of the French ('market with fleas'). At least 22 other languages calque the French expression directly or indirectly through another language.

The word loanword is a calque of the German noun Lehnwort. In contrast, the term calque is a loanword, from the French noun ("tracing, imitation, close copy").

Another example of a common morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation is of the English word "skyscraper", a kenning-like term which may be calqued using the word for "sky" or "cloud" and the word, variously, for "scrape", "scratch", "pierce", "sweep", "kiss", etc. At least 54 languages have their own versions of the English word.

Some Germanic and Slavic languages derived their words for "translation" from words meaning "carrying across" or "bringing across", calquing from the Latin translātiō or trādūcō.

The Latin weekday names came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies (later mercredi in modern French), was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.

History

Since at least 1894, according to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, the French term calque has been used in its linguistic sense, namely in a publication by Louis Duvau: |Un autre phénomène d'hybridation est la création dans une langue d'un mot nouveau, dérivé ou composé à l'aide d'éléments existant déja dans cette langue, et ne se distinguant en rien par l'aspect extérieur des mots plus anciens, mais qui, en fait, n'est que le calque d'un mot existant dans la langue maternelle de celui qui s'essaye à un parler nouveau. [...] nous voulons rappeler seulement deux ou trois exemples de ces calques d'expressions, parmi les plus certains et les plus frappants. | Another phenomenon of hybridization is the creation in a language of a new word, derived or composed with the help of elements already existing in that language, and which is not distinguished in any way by the external aspect of the older words, but which, in fact, is only the copy (calque) of a word existing in the mother tongue of the one who tries out a new language. [...] we want to recall only two or three examples of these copies (calques) of expressions, among the most certain and the most striking.}}

Since at least 1926, the term calque has been attested in English through a publication by the linguist :

: [...] such imitative forms are called calques (or décalques) by French philologists, and this is a frequent method in coining abstract terminology, whether nouns or verbs.

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Kasparek, Christopher. 1983. "The Translator's Endless Toil." The Polish Review 28(2):83–87.
• Robb: German English Words
• Zuckermann, Ghil'ad. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2009. "Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns." Journal of Language Contact (2):40–67.

References

1. Gachelin, Jean-Marc. (1986). "Lexique-grammaire, domaine anglais". Université de Saint-Etienne.
2. (2016). "Loan translations as a language contact phenomenon: Crossing the boundaries between contact linguistics, second language acquisition research and translation studies". Philologia Estonica Tallinnensis.
3. Zuckermann, Ghil'ad. (2003). "Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew". Palgrave Macmillan.
4. Smith, May. ''The Influence of French on Eighteenth-century Literary Russian''. pp. 29–30.
5. [[Henry Watson Fowler. Fowler, H. W.]] [1908] 1999. "[http://www.bartleby.com/116/105.html Vocabulary § Foreign Words]." chap. 1 in ''The King's English'' (2nd ed.). New York: [[Bartleby.com. Bartelby.com]].
6. Shapiro, Michael. (25 January 2013). ""It's OK by Me" as a Syntactic Calque".
7. Gilliot, Claude. "The Authorship of the Qur'ān." In ''The Qur'an in its Historical Context'', edited by [[Gabriel Said Reynolds. G. S. Reynolds]]. p. 97.
8. 9783110231328
9. Durkin, Philip. ''The Oxford Guide to Etymology''. § 5.1.4
10. {{Cite OED. liverwurst
11. {{Cite OED. apple strudel
12. (19 January 2024). "ratón". Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española.
13. "flea market".
14. Knapp, Robbin D. 27 January 2011. "[http://germanenglishwords.com/ Robb: German English Words]." ''Robb: Human Languages''.
15. Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", ''[[The Polish Review]]'', vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, p. 83.
16. Simek, Rudolf. (1993). "Dictionary of northern mythology". D.S. Brewer.
17. (1894). "Expressions hybrides". Mémoires de la Société de linguistique de Paris.
18. (1926). "Slav Linguistic Purity and the Use of Foreign Words". The Slavonic Review.