Czech calques

[Loren A. Billings]

Dear colleagues:

I'd like to quibble with one thing mentioned in the repeated message
below, which reached me on Sunday.  James writes 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 fact, Charles Townsend,
who teaches Czech at Princeton, spends a good while pointing out such
calques.  He is especially qualified to do so, having majored in German
(if I'm not mistaken).  Allow me to quote a more complicated such example
of a more phrasal nature.  In his _Czech through Russian_ (Columbus:
Slavica, 1981), he devotes an entire paragraph to Germanic influence:

     "The West Slavic Czechs, with their Roman Catholic heritage and Latin
alphabet from almost their earliest times, have long belonged
geopolitically and economically to Central Europe, where the dominant
linguistic influence was German.  In spite of the periodic efforts
to purge the language of Germanisms, it is worth remembering that
until the end of World War I the standard literary language and,
often, the primary spoken language of the Czech lands was not Czech
but German, and that a number of times during the 300 years
preceding the formation of the Czechoslovak state the Czech language
came close to extinction.  In any case, it contains a large number
of borrowings from German, both from an earlier stage where they are
phonetically now less obvious; e.g. _r^i's^e_ - _Reich_ 'empire,'
_va'noce_ - _Weihnachten_ 'Christmas,' and more modern words; e.g.
_deka_ - _Decke_ 'blanket,' _ks^eft_ - _Gesch[ae]ft_ 'business.'
Perhaps more important are the more important are the very numerous
loan translations; e.g. _mi't ra'd_ - _gern haben_ 'like,' _pr^iji't
o z^ivot_ - _ums Leben kommen_ 'die.'  The influence of these translations
may even reach a point where fundamental grammatical patterns are
violated; e.g. _vyznat se v c^em_ 'to be well-versed in something' has a
perfective format but is used imperfectively, because it is simply a
calque from German _sich auskennen in etwas_." [p. 7]

I don't have time to leaf through the entire book.  Certainly there are
other such examples there (and in his _A description of Spoken Prague Czech_,
Slavica, 1990).  The point is that someone DOES refer to calques--at least
the ones from German.  I personally recall _vy'let_ (< _Ausflug), mentioned
below, and others during my studies of Czech with Townsend.  As for the
wisdom of doing so, it is certainly helpful for those who have had German.
I had not taken German in any detail at that point and it was not directly
helpful for me.

Finally, Townsend does also concentrate on colloquialisms such as _la'hev_
instead of the more literary _flas^ka_ (_Spoken Prague Czech_, p. 120).

I think this corrects the record sufficiently.  Best,  --Loren Billings

billings at mailer.fsu.edu