Example sentences for: calque

How can you use “calque” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

  • Since English lacks a calque for au revoir , it would be technically possible to make one, perhaps on the model of Joyce's (or his Stephen Dedalus') “agenbite (of inwit)” for remorse: till the agenseeing . But of course such bitterly pedantic wordplay would be unthinkable on the lips of the plain-spoken priest whose words give the Malle film its title and some of its poignancy.

  • Only the first of its four words slips easily enough into English, as till . But English is the only European language I know that has no calque for the expression au revoir , probably because we have adopted this French phrase, like many others, intact, while other languages have the phrase calqued as: hasta la vista, a rivederci, do svidaniya, do widzenia, auf Wiedersehen, etc.

  • As a calque it would come into English as vocalness , which is no word.

  • At one time they even invented a Hungarian word for telephone: távbeszélö (literally, distance talker; a calque of German Fernsprecher).

  • There is also the learned guess, as in the etymology for groundhog , the Midland name for the eastern woodchuck, which may be a calque from Dutch aertoercken , and archaic variant of aardvarken , literally `earth pig'; or hieronymous , a euphemism for the posterior, which may derive from Greek hieron osteon , the name for the sacrum; or the southern Appalachian expression to come out of the little end of the horn meaning `to be unlucky,' which is probably an allusion to a “reverse” cornucopia.


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