969. From "wolkenkratzer" in German to "flea market" in English, direct translations called calques show how languages borrow from each other. This week, we look at how these translations are changing English in Miami and Spanish in Louisiana. Plus, we look at the difference between "gumball machine" and "gumballs machine" and how it might explain Joe Alwyn's Tortured Man Chat.
969. From "wolkenkratzer" in German to "flea market" in English, direct translations called calques show how languages borrow from each other. This week, we look at how these translations are changing English in Miami and Spanish in Louisiana. Plus, we look at the difference between "gumball machine" and "gumballs machine" and how it might explain Joe Alwyn's Tortured Man Chat.
The calques segment was written by Susan K. Herman, a retired multidisciplined language analyst, analytic editor, and instructor for the federal government.
Corpus Links Mentioned: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/, https://www.english-corpora.org/
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/calques
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, I have a really cool language story about the way phrases get translated into other languages, and then as a follow up to last week's segment about "The Tortured Poets Department," I have a piece about why it's a gumball machine and not a gumballs machine.
But first, if you teach college students, check out my LinkedIn Learning courses. They are very likely free through your university library, and I have bite-sized lessons on almost any writing advice you'd want to give to your students. Have someone who has trouble with semicolons? Commas? Passive voice? I have short videos you can assign for that and much much more. Just search for Grammar Girl at LinkedIn Learning.
by Susan Herman
If you're a long-time listener, you've heard me talk about some of the ways other languages influence English, and vice versa. In episode 892, we looked at how Spanish influences English, primarily through loan words, which one language "borrows" from another. And back in episode 883, we talked about code-switching, which is when bilingual or multilingual speakers switch between two (or more) languages in the same phrase or sentence.
Well, today we're going to look at another fascinating linguistic phenomenon that happens when there is close contact between two languages (English and Spanish in the U.S., for example): calques, also known as loan translations. "Calque" comes from a French word that means to trace or copy, and what makes calques distinct is that they're literal translations from one language to another. This can happen with specific words or phrases, meanings, or sounds. "Calque" can also be used as a verb, as in "an expression from Spanish was calqued into English."
Calques can happen both ways (from English and into English), and some examples will help. One notable example of a word going from English into other languages is "skyscraper." The book "Sociolinguistics: a Very Short Introduction" by John Edwards notes that "'skyscraper' has become 'wolkenkratzer' ('cloud scraper' in German) and 'gratte-ciel' ('sky scraper' in French)." Edwards' book also has an example of a word calqued from French into English: ‘marché aux puces’ became ‘flea market’ in English.
Now let's look at how calques – particularly from Spanish – show up in U.S. English. One example that has received a lot of attention lately comes from southern Florida, specifically the Miami area. Associate professor of linguistics at the International University of Florida Phillip M. Carter noted the following examples of calques in the English of people in Miami in his recent research:
“We got down from the car and went inside.”
“I made the line to pay for groceries.”
“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”
If these sound funny to you, it's because they are direct translations from Spanish. They are how the same verbs are expressed in Spanish, literally: "bajarse del carro," or "to get down from the car"; "hacer cola," or "to make line"; and "hacer una fiesta," or "to make a party."
Why did this happen, though? Well, as Carter points out, after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, lots and lots of Cubans came to the Miami area, creating what he calls "one of the most important linguistic convergences in all of the Americas." Not knowing, at first, how to express these ideas, people simply translated them literally from Spanish. And that's no surprise, since, as Carter points out, as much as 80 to 90% of the population in some areas of Miami-Dade County identifies as Latino or Hispanic (and you can see episode 958 for more on those terms).
In his study, along with linguist Kristen D'Allessandro Merii from the University of Buffalo, Carter identified three main types of calques in the English of South Florida: literal lexical calques (like the examples you just heard), semantic calques, and phonetic calques. I should note that phenomena like calques are not always clear cut. Linguists don't always agree, as you will learn if you dive into this study. Carter and Merii disagree on some examples and whether they are really calques or just part of the normal, internal evolution of Spanish.
Semantic calques are translations of meaning, instead of literal translations. Carter and Merii note that the Spanish word "carne," or "meat," "… can refer to both all meat, or to beef, a specific kind of meat. We discovered local speakers saying 'meat' to refer specifically to 'beef' – as in, 'I’ll have one meat empanada and two chicken empanadas.'" So, in this case, Spanish speakers have assigned a new – or additional – meaning to a Spanish word when using English.
Then there are phonetic calques, which are the translations of certain sounds. The researchers found an interesting example in "Thanks to God," from the Spanish
"Gracias a Dios." According to the researchers, "in this case, speakers analogize the 's' sound at the end of 'gracias' and apply it to the English form." (meaning "thanks").
Interestingly, when the researchers asked people from Miami and from other places in the U.S. whether the calques they heard in Miami were acceptable, the majority of both groups were OK with them, but people from Miami approved of them much more.
But calques don't only happen in Miami. They can happen any place where there's a large population of speakers of languages other than English. In a study of calques used by Hondurans and Salvadorans in southern Louisiana, Alexandra Janine Bivin from Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College looked at, among other factors, age of arrival. She found that "the participants who moved to the U.S between the ages of [11 and 18] produced the most calques, while those who moved to the U.S after the age of [19] produced the least." Again, not surprising, since young folks are the pioneers of language change.
Some examples Bivin found in the bayou include:
In these examples, Spanish speakers are using an adaptation of Spanish words or
phrases based on their English equivalents, instead of using standard Spanish. It's a
way of melding the two languages they know.
Finally, let's not forget the sunny Southwest, which is home to many, many
Spanish speakers. In this case, their contact with English has had a huge impact on
local Spanish. A very common calque found there is "pa'trás," which is short for "para atrás," meaning "back" or "backwards." It is used by Spanish speakers in the Southwest in literal translations of terms like "come back," "call back," or "move back." The thing is, there are already separate verbs for these actions in standard Spanish.
So you'll hear phrases like "Te llamo pa'trás" for "I'll call you back," instead of the standard Spanish "Te devuelvo la llamada" – which means literally, "I will return the call to you." Susan, who wrote this segment, also heard and used this term frequently while living in Tucson. Another one of her favorites is "Te doy un raite" for "I'll give you a ride (or lift)," instead of the standard Spanish "Te llevo" – literally, "I'll carry (or take) you." This is an example of a lexical calque from the Spanish verb "dar" conjugated as "doy" (meaning "I give" or "I will give"), combined with a phonetic calque (from the English word "ride").
As Jens H. Clegg, professor of language and culture at the University of Purdue Fort Wayne found, "patrás" is used almost 30 times more by bilingual Southwesterners than by monolingual Spanish speakers. But, he says, "these new meanings and usages are not so foreign to Spanish that they are unintelligible and, in fact, are usages and meanings which monolingual Spanish may someday extend to "patrás." The English influence simply accelerated and broadened the change."
So when you hear a calque in English – something that sounds a little "off" – remember that it is a normal part of the evolution of language and a sign that the speaker knows at least two languages well. As Bivin points out in her article, "many people may consider calques to be the deterioration or debasement of a language, [but] they are more the evolution, expansion, and progress of language." And Penn State professor of linguistics and Spanish John M. Lipski states in "Varieties of Spanish in the United States," "… calques rarely break the grammatical rules of either language, which is why they require a higher level of proficiency in the two languages."
And these examples are just the tip of the iceberg! We'd love to hear about the calques you hear in your neck of the woods!
That segment was written by Susan K. Herman, a retired multidisciplined language analyst, analytic editor, and instructor for the federal government.
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Next, my editor, who is much more culturally savvy than I am, told me that people think "The Tortured Poets Department," the title of Taylor Swift's new album, has something to do with her ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and a group chat he had with friends that he called the "Tortured Man Club," which sounds weird to me. Why is "Man" singular? For example, I would write about a "bike riders club," not a "bike rider club," and it got me thinking about why we use singular or plural nouns in that attributive position. And I remembered that I have a piece on that exact topic from Neal Whitman. So here we go.
Have you ever looked at one of those gigantic gumball machines that hold thousands of gumballs, and wondered why it’s called a gumball machine instead of a gumballs machine? Or why people who manage projects in the corporate world are called project managers instead of projects managers? You may have figured it was just one of the peculiarities of English that the first noun in a compound noun has to be singular. But then what about singles bars, systems analysts, and the rewards cards that so many stores are forcing us to get these days?
Let’s start with some vocabulary we’ll need to talk about compound nouns. In a compound noun such as “gumball,” the second noun, “ball,” is called the head noun. The head noun tells you what kind of thing the whole compound is referring to: A gumball is a kind of ball. The first noun, “gum,” which modifies the head noun, is called an attributive noun or a qualifying noun.
Linguists have been trying to figure out what’s going on with singulars and plurals inside English compound nouns for at least 40 years. It turns out that there are some discernible patterns and tendencies, but unfortunately, they’re subject to a lot of variation and exceptions, which makes them practically useless if you’re just trying to figure out whether to go with a singular or a plural. We’ll look at these tendencies, and then give our Quick and Dirty Tip for dealing with attributive nouns.
David Crystal, a linguist who has written many books on English, notes that when there’s a meaning difference between a compound with a singular attributive noun and one with a plural, people usually keep the plural. For example, if I talked about a reward card instead of a rewards card, that could sound like a card that was given to me as a reward. I also found out that system analysis is a field of electrical engineering, so it makes sense that the business-related term “systems analysis” uses the plural noun “systems” to distinguish itself. For yet another example, “sale” often refers to an event in which normal prices are reduced. “Sales,” however, refers to all purchases that a store’s customers make, whether during a special-event sale or not. So to refer to an employee who deals with everyday sales, we say “sales clerk” and not “sale clerk.”
Crystal also points out that if a noun is a pluralia tantum—that is, a noun that exists only in the plural—it will probably stay that way as an attributive noun. So we have “economics textbooks,” “clothes hampers,” and of course, “Thanksgiving” (remember that one from episode 902?). Of course, there are exceptions, in which even nouns that supposedly don’t have singular forms get one just for use in compounds. For example, what do you call the legs on a pair of pants? In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which I’ll talk more about in a minute, “pant leg” beats “pants leg” two to one.
But what about when you’re dealing with an ordinary noun that has regular singular and plural forms, and when you put it into a compound noun, you can’t tell if it makes a difference whether you use the singular or the plural? There are a couple of tendencies at work in these cases. First, linguists have observed that plural attributive nouns are more likely when you’re thinking about different kinds of that noun. So for example, an enemies list contains specific people you need to keep an eye on, and a publications catalog lists different publications available to order. Notice that it’s not enough that there be lots of the thing the attributive noun refers to; there have to be significantly different kinds. That’s why someone who keeps bees is still a beekeeper and not a bees-keeper, even though the hives may contain thousands of bees.
For the bad news, this reasoning would also predict that we would say "projects manager" instead of "project manager," since they manage many kinds of projects. Again, we’re facing exceptions.
The second tendency is that plurals are also more likely if the attributive noun is abstract. For example, the abstract noun “admission” is usually in the plural in compounds such as “admissions committee,” “admissions policies,” and “admissions department.” Conversely, the concrete noun “rock” stays singular in the compound “rock pile.”
With all these exceptions and all this variation, how can you actually decide whether to go with singular or plural for an attributive noun? These days you can search through multimillion-word collections of digital text, known as corpora, and find out exactly which possibility is preferred. Mark Davies of Brigham Young University has created several useful corpora, including the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Google Books Corpus, and they’re easy to use. I’ll put a link in the show notes.
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar and a member of the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, school board. You can search for him by name on Facebook, or find him on Twitter as @literalminded and on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
Finally, getting back to the Tortured Man Club, I do wonder if that name was influenced by Andy's Man Club, which is a popular charity in the U.K. that supports men who want to to gather and talk about mental health issues. Joe Alwyn is an English actor, so I bet he would have heard about it.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hi, Grammar Girl. My name's Jane Sykes. And I'm from Davis in Northern California outside of Sacramento. You might detect an accent because I grew up in Australia. I have three wonderful teenage children. When they were little, they used to love going to hotels. In fact, they often preferred not to leave the hotel to go outside because they just wanted to jump on the beds, swipe the hotel room key card, push the elevator buttons, and play in the hotel pool. One of the hotels we used to stay in was the Embassy Suites in Monterey. They loved that hotel so much that one day when we talked about going down to Monterey, my daughter excitedly asked me 'Mommy, are we going to stay at the embassy of sweets?' In other words 'sweets' not 'suites.' To this day, the name 'Embassy of Sweets' has stuck in our family. So now we always refer to Embassy Suites as the Embassy of Sweets. Thank you for your show. I really enjoy it."
Thanks, Jane. That's really cute.
If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
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And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.