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Calque

In linguistics, a calque (/kælk/) 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 lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" has been calqued in dozens of other languages,[1] combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example, German: Wolkenkratzer, Portuguese: Arranha-céu, Turkish: Gökdelen, Swedish: Skyskrapa. 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: 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.[2]

Not to be confused with literal translation or claque.

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.[3]


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.

Phraseological calques: are translated word for word. For example, "it goes without saying" calques the French ça va sans dire.[5]

idiomatic phrases

Syntactic calques: 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 bei, namely from the 1930s Yiddish Broadway musical song title בַיי מיר ביסטו שיין / Bei Mir Bistu Shein / lit.'To Me You're Beautiful'.[6]

syntactic functions

Loan-translations: words are translated by morpheme, or component by component, into another language.

morpheme

Semantic calques (also known as ): 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.

semantic loans

Morphological calques: the of a word is transferred. Some authors call this a morpheme-by-morpheme translation.[7]

inflection

. 1983. "The Translator's Endless Toil." The Polish Review 28(2):83–87.

Kasparek, Christopher

Robb: German English Words

. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-1723-X

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad

2009. Journal of Language Contact (2):40–67.

"Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns."

Notes


Bibliography

EtymOnline

Merriam Webster Online