Calque

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. Some linguists refer to a phonological calque, in which the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language. For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word (), 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 (), or the word "scroll" ()) making 'mouse cursor' () or , "scrolling mouse" (). 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 ==