Loan proverbs

[Wilson Gray]

Doris Day, back in the '50's, had a million-seller with a song
entitled _Che Sera Sera_, which helped to spread that saying around
the English-speaking world.

Russian has "sportsmen" = male athlete, "sportsmenka" = female
athlete, both based upon the non-occurrent "English" sports man
[maen]. English aesc is regularly replaced by /E/ in Russian. An
exception is "botsman," a hypercorrection based on English boatswain.

-Wilson

On 2/14/07, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Loan proverbs
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:40 AM +0000 2/15/07, Chris F Waigl wrote:
> >Charles Doyle wrote:
> >
> >>  Our recent ruminations about "Inter faeces et urinam nascimur" got
> >>me thinking about the (not-very-large?) category that I'll call
> >>LOAN PROVERBS--proverbs uttered in a foreign language within
> >>English discourse--as distinct from "calqued" proverbs or proverbs
> >>that simply have analogs in other tongues or pseudo-foreign
> >>constructions like "Nil illigitimi carborundum." And "true"
> >>proverbs--propositions consisting of entire sentences--not just
> >>phrases or idioms.
> >>
> >>  Last night on TV Dr. House said "Veni, vidi, vici." Then there are
> >>"C'est la vie" and "Che sara sara." "Cogito ergo sum"?
> >>
> >
> >Is "Che sera sera" really a loan? Maybe in the same sense as German
> >"Handy" (mobile phone) and a whole slew of French words -- which are
> >loaned from no particular foreign language though kind of look like
> >English.
>
> I was always fond of "le tennisman", although "le shampooing" has a
> sort of, well, je ne sais quoi.
>
> LH
>
> >Free inventions on a theme.
> >
> >Chris Waigl
> >
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>
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>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Sam'l Clemens

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