Czech calques

James Kirchner JPKIRCHNER at aol.com
Sun Oct 15 16:27:35 UTC 1995


I'm trying to put together a list of Czech words that have been calqued
morpheme by morpheme from Latin or Greek loans that have equivalents in
English, or from German words, much as the German language societies did in
the 19th century with Latinate loanwords in their own language.

The types of words I'm thinking of would be those such as the following:

Cz     soustredovat  (cf. koncentrovat)
Eng   concentrate
     where "sou-" = "con-", "stred-" = "centr-"

Cz     vystrednik
Eng    eccentric
      where "vy-" = "ex-"

Cz     odpad  "garbage"
Ger    Abfall
      where "od-" = "ab-", "pad" = "fall"

Cz     vylet  "excursion"
Ger   Ausflug
     where "vy-" = "aus-", "let" = "flug"

The fact that in teaching Czech as a foreign language no one seems to point
out the existence of such calques, and train students to spot them, in my
opinion needlessly slows vocabulary acquisition and comprehension.  This,
next to the common insistence on teaching only words that are "spisovne" to
the exclusion of foreignisms that are often more common in the spoken
language, have always struck me as an assertion of nationalism over
pragmatism.  Teaching words like "lahev" (bottle) to the exclusion of the
more commonly used Germanism "flaska", for example, cripples the student from
the moment he or she arrives on Czech soil, making it take that much longer
to reach a working degree of comprehension.

If anyone can think of any such calques off the top of their head, or can
suggest lexical threads that would make my search easier, I'd appreciate it.

James Kirchner



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