CALQUES IN CZECH

[Gary Toops]

I guess it's time I put in my two cents' worth.  In the past ten
years I've had various occasions to teach both Czech and Upper
Sorbian.  On no occasion did I find it beneficial to point out
German and Latin calques (whether morphological, semantic, or
phraseological) to my students.  The fact of the matter is that
if students do not have more than a mere smattering of German,
pointing out to them that Czech _vy'let_ is a calque of German
_Ausflug_ is simply going to be meaningless to them.  If, on the
other hand, students do know German fairly well, the connection
between Czech _vy'let_ (or, for that matter, USo _wule~t_) and
German _Ausflug_ is going to be obvious to them, so why bother
to point it out in the first place?

I'll be the first to admit that knowing German *before* beginning
to study Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian, or Lower Sorbian, definitely
makes those languages easier to learn than they would be
without a previous knowledge of German.  Indeed, I recall a time
when Slavic departments in this country required that their gradu-
ate students have a (reading?) knowledge of French and/or German
in addition to a familiarity with at least one Slavic language
besides Russian.  But I'm personally acquainted with three American
Slavists who have become quite proficient in Czech and who to
this day barely know a word of German.  This may seem incongruous
to those of us who constantly have recourse to German in our
ongoing study of certain West Slavic languages, but, as they say,
if you've never had it (in this case, German), you don't miss it.
A while back I even surprised myself by writing in an article:

     The fact that the grammar of a particular Slavic language
     exhibits certain syntactico-semantic results of having
     been influenced by German is frequently presumed to mean
     that the Slavic language in question displays features
     resulting from direct imitation.  Often such presumptions
     appear to render unnecessary the pursuit of further lin-
     guistic inquiry along the lines in question.  A predispo-
     sition to attribute various West Slavic grammatical
     phenomena solely to German influence may, in fact, obscure
     both an awareness and an understanding of grammatical
     processes operating *within* a particular Slavic language
     itself.
     (_Germano-Slavica_ 7 (1992):2 + 8 (1993):1, p. 3)


Sorry, I didn't realize this posting had gotten so long!


Gary H. Toops                               TOOPS at TWSUVM.UC.TWSU.EDU
Associate Professor                         Ph (316) 689-3180
Wichita State University                    Fx (316) 689-3293
Wichita, Kansas 67260-0011 USA