Not to be confused with literal translation or claque.
Look up calque in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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. 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]
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.
^Gachelin, Jean-Marc (1986). Lexique-grammaire, domaine anglais. Université de Saint-Etienne. p. 97. ISBN 978-2-901559-14-6.
^Simek, Rudolf (1993). Dictionary of northern mythology. D.S. Brewer. p. 371. ISBN 0-85991-369-4.
^Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.
Look up calque in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. In linguistics, a calque (/kælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language...
list contains examples of calques in various languages. Running dog calques Chinese: 走狗; pinyin: zǒu gǒu. brainwashing calques Chinese: 洗腦; pinyin: xǐ nǎo...
In linguistics, an etymological calque is a lexical item calqued from another language by replicating the etymology of the borrowed lexical item although...
pronunciation: [lɛse le bɔ̃ tɑ̃ ʁule]) is a Louisiana French phrase. The phrase is a calque of the English phrase "let the good times roll", that is, a word-for-word...
eats bread with you"), first attested in the Salic law (c. AD 500) as a calque of the Germanic expression gahlaibo (literally, "with bread"), related to...
commonplace is a calque of locus communis, itself a calque of Greek κοινός τόπος. subject matter is a calque of subiecta māteria, itself a calque of Aristotle's...
"children's garden"). The word calque is a loanword, while the word loanword is a calque: calque comes from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close...
liverwurst is a partial calque of German Leberwurst (pronounced [ˈleːbɐˌvʊʁst] ) 'liver sausage', and 'liver sausage', a full calque. A fourteenth century...
French mercredi, Spanish miércoles or Italian mercoledì, the day's name is a calque of Latin dies Mercurii 'day of Mercury'. Wednesday is in the middle of the...
term in philology.[dubious – discuss] It was possibly a calque of German Vorwort, itself a calque of Latin praefatio. Afterword Epigraph Introduction Preface...
Turkish and Ladino: kaza Armenian: աւան (awan, a calque meaning "borough") Bulgarian: околия (okoliya, a calque meaning "district") and кааза̀ (kaazà) French:...
lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already...
calx, "heel". From this same source comes calque, also known as a loan translation. One common example of a calque is brainwashing (from Mandarin Chinese...
philosophy, and mathematics. English continues to gain new loanwords and calques ("loan translations") from languages all over the world, and words from...
England: Tolkien carefully constructed the Shire as an element-by-element calque upon England. There are other connections; Tolkien equated the latitude...
many modern languages, the word for a honeymoon is a calque (e.g., French: lune de miel) or near-calque.[citation needed] Persian has a similar word, mah-e-asal...
through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between...
Argentina Chilean people Chinaman United States, Canada Chinese people A calque of the Chinese 中國人. It was used in the gold rush and railway-construction...
A found object (a calque from the French objet trouvé), or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not...
transparency in the Soviet Union within the framework of perestroika, and the calque of the word entered into English in the latter meaning. In the Russian Empire...
numbers, instead of the Western Arabic numerals. The word śūnya for zero was calqued into Arabic as صفر sifr, meaning 'nothing', which became the term "zero"...
primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calques), phonetic translation (by sound), or a combination of the two. Today,...
"to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱad-. The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall". The sense is that all...
dictionary. Gold Mountain and similar may refer to Gold Mountain (toponym), a calque nickname referring to a settlement with a surge of Chinese population caused...
"Pluto" in various transliterations. In Japanese, Houei Nojiri suggested the calque Meiōsei (冥王星, "Star of the King (God) of the Underworld"), and this was...
target language (a process also known as "loan translation") are called calques, e.g., beer garden from German Biergarten. The literal translation of the...
contact phenomenon, resulting from a word-for-word translation called a calque. Piirainen says that may happen as a result of lingua franca usage in which...
European Union since 2012. The country's English name derives from a Venetian calque of the Serbian phrase "Crna Gora", meaning literally "Black Mountain", deriving...
the adjacent angles are equal, then they are right angles. The term is a calque of Latin angulus rectus; here rectus means "upright", referring to the vertical...
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