Every language has these. Chinese prefers calques to loanwords, but even it has 浪漫 lang4man4 romantic
yawn
This is one of those things where formally, sure, there’s a difference, but I’ve never heard anyone use that first term. Everything’s a loanword. And these kinds of things are in many, if not all, languages, from my attempts at learning other languages.
English is not a language.
English is 6 drunk raccoons driving an M1 Abrams through a Wendy’s drivethru.
Hey that’s the raccoon whisperer but Soldier from TF2. I’ve never seen that, that’s great.
I did nothing, but fed raccoons for three days
What I think is interesting about the word flea market is that it’s a calque in pretty much all languages.
The Swedish word is “loppis”, which is a cutesy colloquial term for “loppmarknad.” Loppa, meaning flea, and marknad meaning market.
Flohmarkt in German also means lit. “flea market.”
Marche aux puces is French, where “puce” means flea, I think this might be the origin of the term.
Japanese has the casual term フリマ (fleama), short for フリーマーケット, which is just the English term “flea market”, there’s also the term 蚤の市, just meaning “market of fleas.”I believe Portuguese calls it a “thieves’ market”, but Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, and Mandarin all use their own native words for “flea market”; mercado de pulgas, mercato delle pulci, Блошиный рынок, Bit Pazarı, Vlooienmarkt, 跳蚤市场.
For all of the concepts and such that are identical across cultures, few things have universal names. Typically they enter the language as loanwords as well (e.g. karaoke, from Japanese ‘空オケ’, hollow orchestra), so the term “flea market” stands out to me. I’m sure there are lots of other similar things I’m not aware of though.
In Portuguese is “Mercado de Pulgas” which is flea market.
Edit: a reminder that there are 2 very different portuguese languages that shouldn’t have the same name lol.
I started talking to a dude from Brazil a couple of months ago, and was blown away just by how different Brazilian Portuguese is from Portuguese, even just phonetically. I should’ve probably mentioned that I really only speak English, Swedish, and Japanese, so any other examples are ones that I’ve dug up in lexicons and the like, so there may be terms that are direct translations but not actually used colloquially.
I can totally see different words being used between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal-Portuguese.
thieves market
I’ve definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.
Vlooienmarkt in Dutch, also literally flea market.Edit: Nvm, I’m blind, I see you already mentioned it.
That reminds me of the word ‘Frank,’ which was used by the Byzantines to essentially mean ‘all those non-Roman barbarians to the west of us’ and which, after the Crusades, spread as a word across Asia meaning ‘Europeans.’
Thank you for sharing! I had not heard of this before. I particularly enjoyed this bit
Farang khi nok (Thai: ฝรั่งขี้นก, lit. ‘bird-droppings Farang’), also used in Lao, is slang commonly used as an insult to a person of white race, equivalent to white trash, as khi means feces and nok means bird, referring to the white color of bird-droppings
That’s so colourful. I love it.
It also made me think of the fictional race in Star Trek, the Ferengi. At least according to Wikipedia that is precisely the origin of their name!
There’s no perhaps about it.
Lots of !badlinguistics in this thread (but some goodlinguistics too though!).
English is a germanic language. Is loanword and actual calque, and not an “evolved” version of a root word?
Loanword came into the language around 1860 so it is a claque. If it had been in the vocabulary since old-english then it would just be an evolved version of the German root.
No, it was imported from German. Frisian and Dutch have “lienwurd” and “leenwoord” too (also calqued from German)
