Czech calques

[David Pitkethly]

 i am a Czech student and always hard at work to make some sense
(oxymoron, i think) out of this language. i would be very interested in
your list, when you even compile just a small one! anything would help!
plase send on to me. a grateful student of an impossible language, Mara

On Sun, 15 Oct 1995, James Kirchner wrote:

> 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
>