What happens when your whole community changes your own language?
Peter Trughill looks at Ireland:
The traces that we can’t shift
Communities can switch language – like the Irish who gradually gave up Gaelic for English – but they retain parts of the old one, too
“Language shift” is a term which refers to situations where an entire community, or a large proportion of it, gradually stops speaking their mother tongue and switches to another language.
Until the 19th century, most people in most of Ireland were native speakers of Irish Gaelic. But then a process of language shift set in whereby the majority of the population gradually abandoned the Irish language and shifted to the colonial language, English. Today the entire island of Ireland has become a space where English is spoken natively instead of, or as well as, Irish Gaelic – there are still hundreds of thousands of people living there who can speak Irish.
This shift has meant that many traces of Gaelic can be found in the modern English of Ireland. These linguistic vestiges resulted from 19th-century English having been learnt post-childhood as a second or foreign language by people whose mother tongue had been Gaelic.
When adults and adolescents learn a foreign language, they invariably retain a foreign accent and tend not to reproduce the grammar of the new language exactly. This is how some non-native features found their way into the English of originally Irish mother-tongue communities – and have now become established as an integral part of the native-speaker English of Ireland.
The traces of Irish Gaelic which were left behind include Gaelic-origin words, and aspects of the pronunciation of Irish English, but we also find grammatical features. The grammatical construction known as the “after perfect” is exemplified in Irish English expressions such as “I’m after reading the paper”, meaning “I’ve just read the paper”. This is a direct loan translation or calque from Irish Gaelic, where that same grammatical pattern is used.
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The traces that we can’t shift - The New European
'Loan translation' or 'claque' happens a lot -
In linguistics, a calque (or loan translation) can be defined as a word-for-word translation from one language into another. For example, when you take a phrase in French and then literally translate root-for-root or word-for-word into English, that’s a calque.
In English we see many examples of common phrases that are calques translated from other languages. For example; Beer Garden is a calque of the German Biergarten, and Adam’s Apple is a calque of the French pomme d’Adam. In both these examples, English phrases are derived from a direct literal translation of the original. Calque is a loanword from a French noun – it’s derived from the verb calquer, meaning to copy, to trace.
What is Calque (or Loan Translation) | BLEND Blog
Sometimes we adopt a word from a language and translate it more or less literally. And Sometimes, we borrow words directly from another language.
What Is Loan Word?
Borrowing or loan word is a word that is taken from a language and is used in another language, while calque or loan translation is a word that is translated into another language.
Types of Loan-Words
Loan words are those foreign words that one language borrows from another without changing their meaning. There are two types of loan words and we are going to clarify each of them.
Foreign words with the same spelling: a borrowed word of a foreign language that its orthography stays the same.- Umbrella from (Italian) to (English)
- espresso from (Italian) to (English)
- pasta from (Italian) to (English)
- Café from (French) to (English)
- Ski from (Norwegian) to (English)
- Bazaar from (Persian) to (English)
Foreign words with different spelling: The orthography of the word changes in the target language.
- Chofer (Spanish) from (French) chauffeur
- Futbal (Hungarian) from (English) Football
- sˇekki (Finnish) from (English) check
What Is Calque?
Loan-translation or calque is used when a word is translated word by word into another language. Remember that calque is a semantic or syntactic translation and it does not have phonetic matching.
Types of Calque
Phraseological calque: when idiomatic phrases or sets of expressions have been translated word by word.
- 'It goes without saying' (English) tranlated from 'ça va sans dire' (French) In this example, ça = it, va = goes, sans = without, dire = saying
- 'schau stehlen' (German) translated from 'steal the show' (English)
Syntactic calque: Syntactic or structural calque is the product of an inexact connection between the elements of a sentence or phrase.
- in order to = en orden a (instead of ''para'') from French to English.
- to find guilty = encontrar culpable (instead of ''declarar culpable'') from Spanish to English.
Semantic calque: Additional meanings of the words in the source language are transferred to the word in the target language, with the same primary meaning.
- Biergarten (German) = beer garden (English) Here, the concept of 'beer garden' is derived from German language.
- Computer mouse (English) = souris (French)
- Hot dog (English) = perros calientes (Spanish)
- Gratte-Ciel (French) = scrape-sky (English)
- Marché aux puces (French) = flea market (English)
Loan Words and Calques in The English Language | LanGeek
With more here - including an interesting bit of translation:
Calque - Wikipedia
And more:
- brainwashing from 洗脑 – xǐnǎo
- lose face from 丢脸 – diūliǎn
- paper tiger from 纸老虎 – zhǐlǎohǔ
Fun Facts About English #31 – Loan Translations
Some lists:
German Loan Words in the English Language
English Words Used in Czech
Which brings us to Czenglish:
Czenglish - Wikipedia
And Denglish:
Denglisch - Wikipedia
And the specific problems for Czech/German speakers learning English:
Common Problems for German Learners of English | The TEFL Academy
10 typical mistakes made by German speakers who are learning English – English with Kirsty
Pronunciation problems for Czech speakers of English
TEN ENGLISH MISTAKES CZECH PEOPLE MAKE - TOM CZABAN
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