English calques and pseudo-anglicisms in Russian, Czech & Slovenian phraseology

[Heinrich Pfandl]

Dear Seelangers,

In the course of my work about anglicisms in Slavic languages I found that
Russians do not only use English words, but also whole phrases in Russian
that are loan-translations from English. Thus, the sentence "net problem"
as well as "bez problem" is a calque of the English "No problem", or, as I
was told by Marina Glovinskaja, saying "Eto Vasha/tvoja problema" (<That's
your problem) does not correspond to the Russian mentality. The same occurs
on Russian TV, when the speaker, while announcing some advertisments,
finishes his speech with "Ostavajtes' s nami" (< Stay with us).
On the other hand, in the field of phraseology there are also some
pseudo-anglicisms, such as Slovenian "Gremo v lajf", literally 'Let us go
(in)to the life', which means 'Let us go out', or the well-known
exclamation "Ask!" ('of course') in Russian youth slang. By the way, the
answers to Priestly's question about Chizhik could be complemented by the
folkloric "Chizhik-pyzhik, what you do?/ I am sitting na xuju" :-)

I would like to collect some such phraseologic calques of English in
Russian, Slovenian and Czech as well as pseudo-anglicisms in these
languages and would be grateful to you, if you could send me such examples.
Examples from other Slavic languages are also accepted. Please, reply to
the list or off-list, as you prefer.

HP


                                * * *

Heinrich Pfandl
Institut fuer Slawistik der Universitaet Graz
Merangasse 70
A-8010 GRAZ, Austria.
Tel.: +43/316/380-2525 oder 2520.
Fax: +43/316/380-9773.
mailto:pfandl at kfunigraz.ac.at

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