Calque
Calque
5th Bomber Command
Category="Linguistics"In Linguistics, a calque (pronounced [kælk]) or loan translation is a phrase borrowed from another Language by literal word-for-word translation. For example, in some dialects of French, the English term "Weekend" becomes la fin de semaine ("the end of week"), a calque, but in some it is left untranslated as le week-end, a Loanword. "Loan translation" is itself a calque of German Lehnübersetzung.The word is also used as a verb: to calque means to loan translate from another language to create a new Lexeme in the target language. The term comes from the French word calquer, "to copy."
English
Calques from Chinese
Calques from French
Calques from German
Calques from Latin
- English Commonplace calques Latin locus commūnis (referring to a generally applicable literary passage), which itself is a calque of Greek koinos topos
- English Devil's Advocate calques Latin advocātus diabolī, referring to an official appointed to present arguments against a proposed canonization or beatification in the Catholic Church
- English Dog Days calques Latin diēs canīculāris
- English wisdom tooth calques Latin dēns sapientiae
- English Vicious circle calques Latin circulus vitiōsus
- English Milky Way calques Latin via lactea
- English foot in the sense of a unit of metrical verse (e.g. in the fourth foot of the verse...) calques Latin pes which is used in both senses; the transferred use in Latin is itself a calque on Greek pous.
Calques from Spanish
- English blue-blood calques Spanish sangre azul
- English moment of truth calques Spanish el momento de la verdad
Romance Languages
Examples of Romance language expressions calqued from foreign languages include:- French lune de miel and Spanish luna de miel calque English Honeymoon
- French gratte-ciel and Spanish rascacielos calque English Skyscraper
- French sabot de Denver calques English Denver boot
- French jardin d'enfants and Spanish jardín de infantes calque German Kindergarten
German
- German Wolkenkratzer calques English Skyscraper (but literally means cloud scraper)
- German Nashorn calques the ultimately Greek Rhinoceros
- German Großmutter and Großvater calque French grand-mère and grand-père, respectively
- German Fernsehen calques the English coinage, half-Greek and half-Latin, Television (lit. 'to see far').
Finnish
- Germanic passive agent marker - There is no passive voice in Finnish, but an impersonal, where the agent is never mentioned. Due to the influence of Germanic languages, the word toimesta "from the action" has been constructed in order to mention the agent, i.e. to function like the word "by". (It is impossible to translate the word "by" itself, because there is no direct equivalent.) For example, "Lentokonetta lennetään ohjaajan toimesta", approximately "The plane is being flown, from the action of the pilot." This is grammatically incorrect, but used abundantly in legal documents and sloppy translations.
- Swedish future marker kommer att or German werden calqued as tulla + (verb in third infinitive illative) - There is no Future tense in Finnish, and the calque is produced by translation from Swedish and German. Notice that the verb tulla takes up the inflection, and is to be placed into the appropriate tense and person. The calque corresponds to English "is going". For example, tullaan muuttamaan "is going to be changed". This is considered incorrect grammar, but perfectly understandable and found in translations, political speech and even in legal documents.
- English you-impersonal calqued; e.g. sä et elä jos sä et syö is word-for-word "you don't live if you don't eat", unlike the native Syömättä ei elä. Notice that this phenomenon is not always traceable to English.
Since Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language, differs radically in pronunciation and orthography from Indo-European languages, most loans adopted in Finnish either are calques or soon become such. Examples include:
- from Greek: sarvikuono (rhinoceros, from Greek "rinokeros"),
- from Latin: viisaudenhammas (wisdom tooth, from Latin "dens sapientiae"),
- from English: kovalevy (English "hard disk"),
- from French: kirpputori (flea market, French "marché aux puces"),
- from German: lastentarha (German "Kindergarten"),
- from Swedish: moottoritie (highway, from Swedish "motorväg"),
- from Chinese: aivopesu (brainwash, from Chinese "xi nao")
- from Spanish: siniverinen (blue-blooded, from Spanish "de sangre azul")
Sometimes calques may come from two different languages, like panssarivaunu from German "Panzerwagen" or tankki from English "tank" for armoured fighting vehicle.
Ukrainian
- from Russian: velyke spasybi (Russian "bol'shoe spasibo")
- from Russian: neobxindnyj (Russian "neobxodimyj")
See also