Japanese fleama though appears to be a loan word and not a calque like the rest.
Comment on It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
manucode@infosec.pub 5 months ago
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Now this guy is paying attention!
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Wouldn’t it be both? Assuming 蚤の市 and フリーマーケット have the same meaning.
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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”
manucode@infosec.pub 5 months ago
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.
randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 5 months ago
No, it’s the other way around. 蚤 means flea and 市 means market. フリーマーケット sounds like flea market.
BehindTheBarrier@programming.dev 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.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 5 months ago
[deleted]Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
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?
az04@lemmy.world 5 months ago
In European Portuguese it’s “Feira da Ladra”, or “Fair of the (female) Thieve”
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
I can totally see different words being used between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal-Portuguese.
cor315@lemmy.world 5 months ago
thieves market
I’ve definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Aha! See, my first thought was that maybe it had something to do with pickpockets being present!
211@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Add Finnish to the list, “kirpputori” = flea market.
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
Paraneoptera@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
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.
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
“Hippopotamus” is another one. It derives from the Greek words hippos (horse) and potamos (river) and this concept of river horse is present in many different languages:
- German: Flusspferd (lit. river horse)
- Dutch: Rivierpaard (lit. river horse)
- Finnish: Virtahepo (lit. stream horse)
- Danish: Flodhest (lit. flood horse)
- Chinese: 河马 (lit. river horse)
- Arabic: فرس النهر (lit. river horse)
- French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese use variations of hippopotamus.
Tiny variations exist as well:
- Hungarian: Víziló (lit. water horse)
- Afrikaans: Seekoei (lit. sea cow)
Smallwater@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Actually, the Dutch translation is “Nijlpaard”, not “rivierpaard”.
But, it uses the Dutch name for the Nile river, “Nijl”. So it’s lit. “Nilehorse” - which is technically the same as “river horse”, just more geographically specific.
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Aye! Flodhäst in Swedish, and カバ (河馬, 河 river, 馬 horse) in Japanese.
Theme@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
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
Paraneoptera@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Perhaps the Giant London Flea Market will start a trend: queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/…/giant-london-fl…
wide_eyed_stupid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Vlooienmarkt in Dutch, also literally flea market.
kemsat@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s almost like most of those languages you mentioned, had their speakers go everywhere around the world, approximately 500 years ago, and they colonized most of the world, causing many places around the world to use similar idioms…
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.’
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Thank you for sharing! I had not heard of this before. I particularly enjoyed this bit
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 the name!
lars@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
Frankly frankly reminds me of those folks from the north of Gaul