Calque

In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase 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 word or phrase ( lexeme) in the target language. For instance, the English word ''skyscraper'' has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example in German, in Portuguese, in Dutch, in Spanish, in Italian, in Turkish, and ''matenrō'' in Japanese.

Calques, like direct borrowings, often function as linguistic gap-fillers, emerging when a language lacks existing vocabulary to express new ideas, technologies, or objects. This phenomenon is widespread and is often attributed to the shared conceptual frameworks across human languages. Speakers of different languages tend to perceive the world through common categories such as time, space, and quantity, making the translation of concepts across languages both possible and natural.

Calquing is distinct from phono-semantic matching: while calquing includes semantic translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching—i.e., of retaining the approximate sound 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 phrases are translated word for word. For example, " it goes without saying" calques the French .
* ''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 , 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''.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 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" (< German ) and " apple strudel" (< German ).

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" (), making "mouse cursor" (). Another example is the Spanish word ''ratón'' that means both the animal and the computer mouse.

Examples

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 . 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 or .

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

History

Since at least 1894, according to the , the French term ''calque'' has been used in its linguistic sense, namely in a publication by Louis Duvau:

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

: ..such imitative forms are called (or ) by French philologists, 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
* Metatypy
* Wasei-eigo
* Engrish

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.

External links

EtymOnline

Merriam Webster Online

{{Authority control

Etymology

sv:Lånord#Översättninglån