this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 59 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (13 children)

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! 💖

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Japanese fleama though appears to be a loan word and not a calque like the rest.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Now this guy is paying attention!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Pretty much anything in katakana in Japan is loanwords.

Very interesting about flew markets though, Norway is the same as Sweden here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Add Finnish to the list, "kirpputori" = flea market.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

thieves market

I've definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 months ago (2 children)

English is not a language.

English is 6 drunk raccoons driving an M1 Abrams through a Wendy's drivethru.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (11 children)

𝕯𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝕶𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖓𝖚𝖓 𝕰𝖎𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕭𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖗𝖊𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖐 𝕯𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

bro typing in calligraphy 💀

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

*Typografer Gotisch

Bearbeitungsnotiz: Falsch, ist nur Fraktur

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

English is a germanic language. Is loanword an actual calque, and not an "evolved" version of a root word?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

No, it was imported from German. Frisian and Dutch have "lienwurd" and "leenwoord" too (also calqued from German)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

English is a Germanic language, with a lot of it's vocabulary imported from a Romance language (French). Hilarity ensues.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

English is made by English speakers, and English speakers like to do a bit of trolling. Especially when it comes to speaking, reading and writing English.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (11 children)

No amount of exceptions and quirks will prevent you from learning any language as long as you have lots and lots of exposure. After your reach a certain base level you just keep improving as you use the language, and even the exceptions start to feel natural.

English is the only language other than my mother tongue I have achieved this level with. I'd like to think at least in writing it's indistinguishable from a native speaker. Theoretically tho German should be easier for me as I'm Dutch. But my German never reached the same level because of the difference in exposure

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

For me personally, German is really easy as I have been born German. Have you tried that as well?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm German, born and raised, but in Saarland. One time when visiting a friend in Berlin, I was at a bar and got a compliment on how good my German is even tho I'm obviously a foreigner.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Actually no, but I'll try as soon as I have the opportunity. Thanks for the advice!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I live 30km from the French border, I had 10 years worth of French classes at school. I always hated it, but I did an extra-curriculum to acquire a diploma because a classmate and friend of mine didn't want to do it alone. My French is in a weird spot: I cannot form a proper sentence, but I understand listening exercises and written text well. I recently started to go through some French lessons on Duolingo and I'm already struggling with the sentences it expects me to form in unit 8...

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (8 children)

My native language is a Slavic one but I can't fucking learn Polish because the language is just too fucking funny to me.

It's like how English speakers think Dutch is funny but turned up to 11.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

That's a really interesting case of autological and heterological words

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Every language has these. Chinese prefers calques to loanwords, but even it has 浪漫 lang4man4 romantic

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Go speak Lojban with people numbering "beyond what can be counted on the fingers of one hand".

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Also has millions of people ready to correct your pronunciation of a word that is written completely randomly compared to how it's spoken.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

There's no perhaps about it.

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