Discussion Groups / English Usage / June 2010

There's already a North Sea not too far south of there.

But by that logic, wouldn't there be an advantage for English speakers
learning German if the speakers of the latter started using "selten"
for lightly cooked meat?  If they already knew the one meaning of the
word ("rare") some of them might think, upon encountering it in a
cooking context, "hmm... could that by any chance be 'rare' as in rare
meat"?  You've had problems with that one ever since we started
discussing calques two years ago!

I had thought of how calquing a term into another language could give
learners of that language an advantage in the way that you mention,
but in my opinion it's a bit too "clever" to do this.  In any case, if
this is done we should expect lots of calques that, as with "rare",
have no etymological justification, so why do we apparently not get
very many things in language that are etymologically
"mistranslations"?

It wasn't obvious to me!

- Dan

A borrowing?

After all, if "Pacific Ocean" is a calque, then what is "Atlantic
Ocean"?

- Dan

On Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:24:09 +0100, Adam Funk
<a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote in
<news:pfb497xbbu.ln2@news.ducksburg.com> in
sci.lang,alt.usage.english:

ON <grœnn> 'green' had a front rounded vowel, [ø:],
resulting from front umlaut of *o:.  By the late 13th
century this had unrounded and merged with <æ> ([æ:]), which
eventually became [ai:].

The OED has a 1678 citation for <Greenland-Dove>; the
place-name by itself isn't included but must be at least as
old.  On the other hand, I doubt that it's an old borrowing;
it seems much likelier to be a calque.

That's the modern Icelandic spelling, which is found in at
least some mss. of Landnámabók.  The normalized ON spelling,
also found in some mss., is <Grœnland>, from <grœnn> 'green'
(< PGmc. *gro:nja-) and <land> 'land'.  Landnámabók says:

  Þat sumar fór Eiríkr at byggja land þat, er hann hafði
  fundit ok hann kallaði Grœnland, því at hann lét þat
  menn mjök mundu fýsa þangat, ef landit héti vel.
 
  That summer Eirík went to settle the land that he
  had found, and he called it Greenland, because he
  reckoned that people would be very eager to go
  there if the land had a good name.

[...]

Brian

Yes.  I assume this is a borrowing from Danish.

French has "Groenland", /grOEnlA~d/, with a diphthong!

Grænlendinga Saga:

"He [Eirik the Red] named the country he had discovered Greenland, for
he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an
attractive name."

Interesting points.

If multilinguality is so natural, though, why do many linguists seem
to insist that the best way to describe any language is strictly
without reference to others?  

(I'm thinking of a discussion where someone else argued that not only
"gerund" but also "infinitive" is meaningless in English, which just
has collocations of "to" with the bare form of the verb, parallels
with other languages, even Germanic ones, notwithstanding.)

For that story to be true, there would have to be a French word "anglé",
but there isn't. Another popular but equally unlikely tale derives the
name from a German term meaning "angelic horn" (engellisches Horn),
supposedly corrupted into "englisches Horn".

http://books.google.com/books?id=K6gjXe4NOi4C&pg=PA143&dq=%22cor+angl%C3%A9%22&h
l=en&ei=7PvyS9SYJNHu-QadhI2EDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CFAQ
6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

So was the story my oboe teacher passed on to me.  When I looked into
it a few years ago, I found evidence that it was actually named in
Italian for its association with England (actually Wales), e.g.,

   Perhaps I may be pardoned here for observing, that one of the most
   ancient Welch musical instruments, called the Pib-corn or
   Pipe-horn, which is formed of a flute, with a mouth-piece not
   unlike that of the clarionet, inserted into a large horn which
   forms a trumpet-like termination to it, is still recorded by us in
   the favourite popular dance called the Hornpipe; and the sweetness
   of its tones have to this day maintained its use in Italy, under
   the name of Corno Inglese.

           Henry Englefield, _A Walk Through Southampton_, 1805.

Half loanword, half calque?  Wouldn't that produce something like "cor
English" or "horn anglé/anglais"?

Look, here's what Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cor_anglais_(English_horn)) says:

# The term cor anglais is French for English horn, but the instrument
# is neither from England nor a horn. The instrument is thought to
# have originated in Silesia about 1720, when a bulb bell was added to
# the oboe da caccia, a Baroque alto instrument of the oboe family,
# possibly by J. T. Weigel of Breslau. The two-keyed, open-belled
# straight tenor oboe (in French called "taille de hautbois", i.e.,
# tenor oboe) and more especially the flare-belled oboe da caccia
# resembled the horns played by angels in religious icons of the
# Middle Ages and this gave rise in German-speaking central Europe to
# the Middle High German name engellisches Horn, meaning angelic horn.
# But engellisch also meant English in the vernacular of the time, and
# so the angelic horn became the English horn, a name which was
# retained, in the absence of any better alternative, for the curved,
# bulb-belled tenor oboe even after the oboe da caccia fell into
# disuse around 1760.[1]
#
[...]
#
# Its name is sometimes said to derive from its original resemblance
# to the oboe da caccia, which tended to be either bent or curved in
# shape and was thus supposedly called a cor anglé (bent horn), a name
# later corrupted to cor anglais. The cor anglais still has a bent
# metal pipe, known as the bocal, which connects the reed to the
# instrument proper. This, however, is a false etymology, as anglé
# does not mean angled in any language. The name first appeared on a
# regular basis in Italian, German and Austrian scores from 1749,
# usually in the Italian form corno inglese.

Note that with both the "angled" and "angelic" theories, the name
"English horn" (in the latter case, also "cor anglais") would be the
result of a misunderstanding during translation.  Do you think that
the term "English horn" is a "mistranslated" attempt at a calque,
analogous to my hypothetical "seltenes [Steak]" example that I've
given before periodically?  I've been trying to come up with a good
attested example of such a "mistranslation" that I can throw Nathan
with.

- Dan

English has a verb inflection "-en"?