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linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
, a calque () or loan translation is a
word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...
or
phrase In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...
borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" was calqued in dozens of other languages. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as ''
interpretatio germanica Interpretatio germanica is the practice by the Germanic peoples of identifying Roman gods with the names of Germanic deities. According to Rudolf Simek, this occurred around the 1st century AD, when both cultures came into closer contact. Name ...
'': 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 Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...
, then "Wednesday" in Modern English. The term ''calque'' itself is a
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
from the French noun ("tracing, imitation, close copy"), while the word ''loanword'' is a calque of the German noun ''Lehnwort''. Calquing is distinct from phono-semantic matching: while calquing includes semantic translation, it does not consist of
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
matching—i.e., of retaining the approximate
sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' b ...
of the borrowed word by matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existing word or morpheme in the target language. Proving that a word is a calque sometimes requires more documentation than does an untranslated loanword because, in some cases, a similar phrase might have arisen in both languages independently. This is less likely to be the case when the grammar of the proposed calque is quite different from that of the borrowing language, or when the calque contains less obvious imagery.


Types

One system classifies calques into five groups. This terminology is not universal. * ''Phraseological calques'':
idiomatic phrase An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language ...
s are translated word for word. For example, " it goes without saying" calques the French . * ''Syntactic calques'':
syntactic function In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional gra ...
s or constructions of the source language are imitated in the target language, in violation of their meaning. * ''Loan-translations'': words are translated morpheme by morpheme, or component by component, into another language. * ''Semantic calques'' (also known as ''
semantic loan A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change i ...
s''): 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 In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
of a word is transferred. Some authors call this a ''morpheme-by-morpheme translation''.Gilliot, Claude. "The Authorship of the Qur'ān." In ''The Qur'an in its Historical Context'', edited by G. S. Reynolds. p. 97. Some linguists refer to a ''phonological calque'', in which the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language.Yihua, Zhang, and Guo Qiping. 2010. "An Ideal Specialised Lexicography for Learners in China based on English-Chinese Specialised Dictionaries." Pp. 171–92 in
Specialised Dictionaries for Learners
', edited by P. A. F. Olivera. Berlin: de Gruyter
p. 187
For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word (), which literally means "to arrive (as fast) as thunder".


Partial

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 Liverwurst, leberwurst, or liver sausage is a kind of sausage made from liver. It is eaten in many parts of Europe, including Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Polan ...
" (< German ) and " apple strudel" (< German ).


Semantic

The " computer mouse" was named in English for its resemblance to the
animal Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the Kingdom (biology), biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals Heterotroph, consume organic material, Cellular respiration#Aerobic respiration, breathe oxygen, are Motilit ...
. Many other languages use their word for "mouse" for the "computer mouse", sometimes using a diminutive or, in Chinese, adding the word "
cursor Cursor may refer to: * Cursor (user interface), an indicator used to show the current position for user interaction on a computer monitor or other display device * Cursor (databases), a control structure that enables traversal over the records in ...
" (标), making ''shǔbiāo'' "mouse cursor" ().. At least 35 languages have their own versions of the English term.


Examples

The common English phrase " flea market" is a loan translation of the French ("market of fleas"). At least 22 other languages calque the French expression directly or indirectly through another language. Another example of a common morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation, is of the English word " skyscraper", which may be calqued using the word for "sky" or "cloud" and the word, variously, for "scraping", "scratching", "piercing", "sweeping", "kissing", etc. At least 54 languages have their own versions of the English word. Some Germanic and
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
derived their words for "translation" from words meaning "carrying across" or "bringing across", calquing from the Latin or .


History

Since at least 1894, according to TLFi, the French term ''calque'' has been used in its
linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
sense, namely in a publication by Louis Duvau, quote: : ''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 , quote: : ..Such imitative forms are called ''calques'' (or ''décalques'') by French
philologists Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined ...
, and this is a frequent method in coining abstract terminology, whether nouns or verbs.


See also

* Anglicism * Chinese Pidgin English * Cognate * Gallicism * Germanism * Inkhorn term *
Loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
* Metatypy *
Semantic loan A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change i ...
* Translation *
Wasei-eigo are Japanese-language expressions based on English words, or parts of word combinations, that do not exist in standard English or whose meanings differ from the words from which they were derived. Linguistics classifies them as pseudo-loanwords ...
*
Engrish ''Engrish'' is a slang term for the inaccurate, nonsensical or ungrammatical use of the English language by native speakers of Japanese, as well as Chinese and other Asian languages. The word itself relates to Japanese speakers' tendency to ...


References

Notes Bibliography * Kasparek, Christopher. 1983. "The Translator's Endless Toil." ''
The Polish Review ''The Polish Review'' is an English-language academic journal published quarterly in New York City by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. ''The Polish Review'' was established in 1956. Editors-in-chief The following persons hav ...
'' 28(2):83–87.
Robb: German English Words germanenglishwords.com
* 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.


External links


EtymOnline

Merriam Webster Online
{{Authority control Etymology sv:Lånord#Översättninglån