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.
Edit: It’s worth mentioning that other than Swedish (native), English, and Japanese, I don’t speak any of the other languages. I’ve asked a Russian-American friend about the Russian term, and a friend in Taiwan about the Mandarin term. Otherwise I’ve checked dictionaries and the like. Don’t take my word as fact, I’m not a linguist. It was just a pattern I found interesting, because the term itself is so particular. Any and all corrections are more than welcome.
I’m also delighted by the discussion this has sparked! 💖
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.’
Frankly frankly reminds me of those folks from the north of Gaul
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!
Japanese fleama though appears to be a loan word and not a calque like the rest.
Now this guy is paying attention!
Wouldn’t it be both? Assuming 蚤の市 and フリーマーケット have the same meaning.
I assume that 蚤の市 is a loan word and フリーマーケット a calque. But I don’t speak any Japanese.
蚤の市
Yep! nomi no ichi. Nomi (蚤) means flea, and ichi (市) means market, no (の) is a possessive particle making it “flea’s market” or “market of flea”
This is true, I don’t know which word came first. I’d wager a guess that 蚤の市 predates フリーマーケット, but it’s really just a stab in the dark on the basis that English loanwords feel more modern, and it feels unlikely that a calque would be created after a loanword has been widely adopted.
Pretty much anything in katakana in Japan is loanwords.
Very interesting about flew markets though, Norway is the same as Sweden here.
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.
Are you referring to Brazil Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese?
(I’m just randomly curious. And while I’m asking,)
In which country is it Mercado de Pulgas? Do you know if the other one uses Mercado de WhateverThievesisinthatPortuguese?
In European Portuguese it’s “Feira da Ladra”, or “Fair of the (female) Thieve”
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.
Vlooienmarkt in Dutch, also literally flea market.Edit: Nvm, I’m blind, I see you already mentioned it.
Add Finnish to the list, “kirpputori” = flea market.
Is tori ever used like plaza, like the Swedish word “torg?” The way I read tori in my head makes it sound almost homophonous with torg, hence why I ask.
A number of Slavic, Baltic, Norse, (and also Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) use some form of this word for market. It originated in Proto-slavic and passed through Old Norse into descendant languages.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/търгъ#Old_East_Slavic
The most interesting thing is that the root appears to have borrowed into Finnish twice, once probably from Slavic (as turku) and once from Old Norse (as tori).
Unimportant extra: it’s not a calque in British English, because we don’t use it (to the best of my knowledge). Like a potluck, we have the concept but not a word for it, and we don’t use the American phrases either
We have a car boot sale, but that’s literal
There’s probably regional exceptions
Perhaps the Giant London Flea Market will start a trend: https://www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/whats-on/giant-london-flea-market
𝕯𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝕶𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖓𝖚𝖓 𝕰𝖎𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕭𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖗𝖊𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖐 𝕯𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉
bro typing in calligraphy 💀
*Typografer Gotisch
Bearbeitungsnotiz: Falsch, ist nur Fraktur
Your language is weird and fucked up in its own ways, but something like 1.5 billion people know English and most of them as a second language.
Und?
Und ich musste Google Translate verwenden, um Ihnen das auf Deutsch zu sagen, aber Sie müssen es wahrscheinlich nicht tun, um auf Englisch zu antworten.
If mean original comment should be english: no, text in german part of the meme.
I answer in german because that also part of the meme, comment section part of germany mean national language now german.
So what?
So that’s why it’s more confusing that English is weird but also very widely spoken?
He’s just racist, ignore him.
My man, it’s a meme. For some reason you can easily summon a horde of Germans whenever there’s a reference to the German language or Germany. I don’t know what causes this internet phenomenon, maybe our lacking national pride, but it is what it is. And that he’s writing in German is part of a different Reddit meme.
But he has point, our language is weird and fucked up.
Basically every language is weird and fucked up in its own ways.
I’m a native Arabic speaker, and I have to tell you this: the number system is pretty confusing, everything is gendered, and there’s like 100 different words just to describe lions. Also, Arabic poetry always rhymes.
When you learn a new language, you acquire its vocabulary. The etymology of the vocabulary is often irrelevant and can sometimes be beneficial. For example, when I started learning Spanish, I discovered that most French words ending in -al and -tion (a language I already know) are the same in Spanish. This means that I have instantly acquired hundreds of new words in my target language.
Urgh, I resent the english language so much. It’s so inconsistent and weird and unintuitive, which my dumb-dumb rules-focused brain just does not gel with. We should all just use Esperanto or something instead.
You must resent every single natural human language then, since all of them show the exact same kinds of irregularities, for the most part.
And, if we all did decide to use Esperanto because it’s regular (and therefore artificial), irregularities would inevitably be introduced within a single generation, because the nature of human language is to change, and that change will always result in irregularity.
You know what, YEAH, I DO
FUCK language, when’s true 1-to-1 perfect transmission of information and meaning coming out? Get on it, linguists/wizards!
Go speak Lojban with people numbering “beyond what can be counted on the fingers of one hand”.
Minor nitpick, you have causality inverted. Esperanto is artificial and therefore regular.
No, I have it the right way around. Artificial languages can be irregular, so your order doesn’t follow.
No regular language can be natural, though, so if you come across a regular language, you can always correctly conclude that it’s artificial through modus tollens:
“If a language is natural, then it is not regular. This language is regular, therefore it is not natural.”
You’re correct, but try to see it as permission to speak English your own way rather than getting frustrated attempting to speak “correct” English, a fiction which has never existed despite the efforts of generations of stuffy English teachers. There’s been “English as spoken by the privileged class” but it’s no more correct than any other version and breaks as many of its own rules as any other patois or dialect.
Also has millions of people ready to correct your pronunciation of a word that is written completely randomly compared to how it’s spoken.
Gaelic is worse about this. I’ve joked before that the best way to figure out Gaelic pronunciation is to look at the word and figure out the least likely pronunciation that still technically fits the letters, then try to chew on your tongue while saying that.
That’s a really interesting case of autological and heterological words
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.
Well yes, but you could say that about basically every science, not just linguistics. I can think of at least three such cases in German and more specifically German law.
There’s no perhaps about it.
Lots of !badlinguistics in this thread (but some goodlinguistics too though!).
English is actually quite easy. Yes, there is a lot of vocabulary, but almost no conjugations or declinations make it easy compared to some others. My native has 19 different cases with 2-3 variants each for tonal coherence, and 2 modes of full verb conjugation (with additional exceptions of course).
What i found very difficult in english is the fact that there’s no rule on how to pronounce words; you have to learn how to pronounce each word individually. which means that you might know how a word is written and what it means while not being able to recognize it when listening to someone speaking in english.
But come on 12 different grammatical tenses.
They are mostly logical, it’s actually permutations of 3 by 4 conditions.
English is a germanic language. Is loanword an 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.