[fwd from A. Grant:] Jargon loan into Czech

[Dave Robertson]

Laxauya:

You may like to know that there's a CJ loan into Czech.  It happened =
like this:  Czechs read of Western life through the translated novels of =
Karl May and such materials, and became familiar with what was for them =
spelt 'potlach'.  Through a slight semantic shift, the verb potlachat =
became popular usage for 'to chat', and since po- is a perfective prefix =
in Czech, the imperfective was back-formed as tlachat.  So tlachat is =
still used in Colloquial Czech for 'to chat'. =20

My former colleague Viktor Elsik, a linguist from Prague, told me about =
this as he knew it had a Native American connection - but he was =
astounded when I told him the verb derived from CJ.

Best

Anthony Grant

--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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