I am an amateur conlanger – I enjoy creating my own language(s). It is one of those hobbies I keep coming back to, and one that has served me well for 1) knowing far too much about linguistics, 2) being slightly quicker to pick up the grammar of new languages when learning them, and 3) a third thing. Let’s talk about a linguistics topic because we can: calques and loanwords.

A loanword is more or less what it sounds like – when a language just steals a word from another one and goes ‘this is mine now’. It’s common for foods, for fairly obvious reasons – pizza, sushi, crêpe – but languages do this all the time. Take a word or an idea that another language has, change the sounds if necessary, and hey presto, you have a new word.

Calques are a touch more complicated: take a word or phrase in another language, then translate each component into your language so that you have a new thing yourself. Take the Dutch word lijfgarde, translate each little bit, and you’ve got a lifeguard. We’ll be nice – we’ll give them football, and then they can play some voetbal. Simple enough, right?

(Side note: loanword comes from the German word Lehnvort, whereas the word calque we just stole directly from the French. Which, of course, would make loanword a calque and calque a loanword. I love language!)

So let’s have some fun and translate a word into Goja, my constructed language: first as a loanword and then as a calque. Let’s say we wanted to translate the word zeitgeist, which itself is a loanword from German.

Zeitgeist as a loanword is easy enough, though we may have to mangle the pronunciation a little. Goja doesn’t have diphthongs (two vowel sounds merged together: think how the word ray starts with an ‘a’ sound and ends with an ‘ee’ sound). It also doesn’t have final consonant clusters, so that ‘st’ at the end is going to pose a challenge. In the end, zayitgayista felt like the best way to do things, which yeah sure, good enough.

But calques, calques are way more fun, and there are bad ways to do it and good ways to do it. We’ll start with the bad way – zeit means time and geist means ghost, so let’s translate: juk means time in Goja and mikel is ghost, so awesome: jukmikel. All done, right?

Wrong. No. You did the bad translate. Firstly, let’s make a point: in English (and in German), for a lot of compound words, the last part of the word is the main part, and the first part gives some more information about it. Think about the difference between, say, a firetruck and a truckfire. Goja doesn’t work this way – the first part of the word would be the main part. Jukmikel would mean something more like ‘ghost-time’: in other words, asking ‘hey, when does Casper usually get here again?’ or possibly, ‘dammit, I hate visiting the spirit dimension: what timezone are they on again?’. Hard to say, really, but either way, not what we’re looking for.

But mikeljuk wouldn’t be great either, for reasons we’ll get to… now, I guess. Let’s break down what zeitgeist means properly: the spirit of the age, the defining characteristics of some period of history. You can see how ‘spirit of the age’ gets translated as ‘time ghost’, but that means we do have to be careful about exact translations. ‘Period of time’ is probably a better way of thinking about zeit in this context, which in Goja is dejak (can you see the family resemblance to juk? Etymology is important).

But what about geist?

In this case, geist is plausibly better rendered as ‘soul’ or ‘essence’ or something. There is a word in Goja which translates as ‘character, nature, definition, the set of qualities that define or distinguish a person or thing’: najitik. But let’s go a little further, and keep the metaphor of ‘ghost’ as close as we can get it. There is a word that means roughly ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ – but first, a tangent.

There is a concept in linguistics called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Here’s an example: in English, the future is in front of us, whereas the past is behind us – this isn’t literally true, of course, but it’s a way we think about things. In Vietnamese, it’s the other way around – you know what happens in the past, so that’s in front of you; but the future is a mystery, so that’s behind you. In Mandarin, the past is up and the future is down. In Yupno, a language from Papua New Guinea, the past is downhill and the future is uphill, whereas in Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal language, the past is east and the future is west – which, when you think of the Sun, makes a lot of sense. Here’s another time one: in English, you spend time, or you could save it, borrow it, or invest it. In any case, you should definitely budget it properly. I’m writing this in my free time. When making Goja, thinking about conceptual metaphor helped me make a language that felt natural.

For the Goja people, speech and song are big conceptual metaphors. The word for murder, zlig, comes from the words zled and gus – etymologically, to murder someone is to steal their words. To be selfish – bulabul – means to be deaf (lapul) to other people’s suffering. When you’re talking about everybody, you’re talking about the choir (dojaj), and if you match with someone and work together perfectly, then you harmonise with them – you givil them. A song is a yalos, but society is yilyos – break the law, and you’re breaking the song, that’s a crime: a yosakhap. Going all the way back to najitik from earlier, that comes from yitik, or ‘trait’, which itself comes from the word yitu, or ‘tone’. Geist translating to ‘ghost’ might work for some cultures and languages, but to a Goja person, their soul or their spirit is their voice: their migli. I would personally translate zeitgeist as miglidejak.

Hopefully this has given you a brief insight into the absolute rabbit-hole that is linguistics and conlanging. To cap it all off, let’s make two new words together: in German, it’s a Lehnvort; in English, a loanword; but in Goja, that can only be a guszefed. And you may not have a calque, but you may just have a galka.

Thanks for reading.