My voice is hoarse this week!
I am acting in my school’s play and sound raspy. The phrase “my voice is hoarse” is an idiomatic expression but the saying “I have a frog in my throat” is called a calque.
A calque is a “loan translation” or literal word-for-word translation from another language. In contrast, loan words or roots are not translated and just become part of the language that adopts them (e.g. “voice” comes from the Old French “voiz”, which comes from the Latin “vox”).
The original phrase is German, “Einen Frosch im Hals haben,” which translates to “to have a frog in one’s throat.” In both languages, these sayings describe a croaky voice.
Calques can be humorous because expressions translated literally into another language result in amusing phrases. Here are some fun ones:
- Thanks from the Mountain!: This calque comes from the Polish phrase “Dzięki z góry” which means “Thanks in advance,” but translates literally “Thanks from the Mountain!”
- To jump over one’s shadow: This calque comes from the German phrase “Über seinen Schatten springen” which means doing something beyond one’s usual limits or comfort zone.
- Long time no see: This calque comes from a literal translation of the Chinese expression “好久不见 (hǎojiǔ bùjiàn) which means “good long no see.”
- Skyscraper: This calque is the French word “gratte-ciel” and translates to “scrape-sky.”
- Mother tongue: This calque comes from the Latin phrase “Lingua materna” and translates into “mother language.”
- Bag End (as in Bilbo Baggin’s home in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien): This calque comes from the French phrase “cul-de-sac” which means dead-end street but literally means the “bottom of a sack.”
I am “jumping over my shadow” this week as I must leap across a gap onto a high balcony on stage, which is scary!
Until we see each other again! This calque comes from the Spanish phrase “Hasta la vista.”
Read more:
Meyer, A. (2015). “Thanks from the Mountain!”: Humorous Calques in Ponglish as an Output of Language Contact and Language Creativity. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 23(1), 33-49. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jsl.2015.0007.
“Loan words, calques, and cognates.” www.lingohub.com. https://lingohub.com/blog/loanwords-calques-and-cognates.
“cul-de-sac – Definition of cul-de-sac in US English by Oxford Dictionaries”. Oxford Dictionaries – English. Archived from the original on November 7, 2014.
Shippey, Tom (1982). The Road to Middle-Earth. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-0-261-10275-0.