October 22, 1997

calque

As usual, your word of the day on bimbo was elegant and authoritative. Now what the hell is a "calque"?

A calque is a technical term in linguistics, another name for a loan translation. The usual meaning of calque is 'a compound word or expression formed by the literal translation of each element of the compound from another language'. A clear example is the English word superman, which is derived from the German word Übermensch, coined by Nietzsche from German über 'above' and Mensch 'man'. A normal borrowing would simply take the German word into English in its German form; a calque translates the elements.

Some other examples of loan translation into English are marriage of convenience, from French mariage de convenance, and world view, from German Weltanschauung. An example of loan translation from English is skyscraper, which appears in French as gratte-ciel ('scrape-sky') and in German as Wolkenkratzer ('cloud-scrape').

Though it is not the usual sense, I often use calque to refer to the literal translation of a figurative sense of a word when that figurative sense does not exist in the borrowing language. So in our bimbo example, the Italian word bimbo normally means 'a little child; baby'. It does not have the slang senses of English baby, where it is used as a term of address between men, or of attractive women. It thus seems likely that when bimbo shows up in Italian with the senses of English baby, it represents the literal translation of the word baby to reflect figurative senses of English baby. Another example, also involving Italian, is the English word jiboney 'a fool'. This probably results from a dialectal Italian word giambone, literally 'ham', as a calque of the English slang term ham in senses relating to overacting.

Both calque and loan translation are first found in the 1930s.