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 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 in German, in Portuguese and Turkish: gökdelen in Turkish.
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.[2]
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.
One system classifies calques into five groups. This terminology is not universal:[3]
Some linguists refer to a phonological calque, in which the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language.[7] For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word, which literally means "to arrive (as fast) as thunder".
Partial calques, or loan blends, translate some parts of a compound but not others.[8] For example, the name of the Irish digital television service Irish: [[Saorview]]|italic=no 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).
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.[9]
See main article: List of calques.
The common English phrase "flea market" is a loan translation of the French ("market with fleas").[10] 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").[11]
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 "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 Latin: translātiō or Latin: trādūcō.[12]
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.[13]
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:[14]
Since at least 1926, the term calque has been attested in English through a publication by the linguist :[15]
[...] such imitative forms are called (or) by French philologists, and this is a frequent method in coining abstract terminology, whether nouns or verbs.
Notes
Bibliography