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.

For those who don’t know, I really enjoy conlanging. For those who don’t know what on earth that last word was, it means to construct a language; hence the term. I’ve not yet finished one, but I love the process of thinking hard about creating new words, about building a grammar from the ground up, about constructing a writing system, and so on and so forth. When I’m more comfortable with the progress of my conlang (constructed language), I’ll most likely put it up here, but until then, I’d like to examine a simple sentence, explore it, talk about what we can learn from it, then add more to it and see what we can learn from that. A disclaimer before I start: I’m largely self-trained, so please don’t take anything here as gospel truth. That being said, let’s get started!

Our sentence today is the following:

I lost my keys.

We can say a few things immediately. Firstly, this language uses an alphabet. This means that consonants and vowels have equal weighting amongst letters (also, that this language uses letters, where are a type of graphemes, a grapheme being the smallest unit of a writing system). This means that the writing system is not an abjad, where each grapheme corresponds to a consonant, and vowels are non-existent or optional, with such examples as Arabic and Hebrew; and that the system is not an abugida, where each unmodified grapheme represents a consonant, and vowels are shown with a diacritic or by modifying the consonant, with such examples as Devanagari (used for Hindi), and the wonderful Ge’ez script, used in Ethiopia. Furthermore, this means that the writing system is not a syllabary, where each grapheme represents a syllable, such as in Japanese kana; and that it is not a logography, where each grapheme represents a whole word, such as in Chinese.

We’re still going with the letters, by the way. We can also tell that these words do not exhibit (and here’s a long technical term that I am about to explain) phonemic orthography. Phonemic means relating to the sounds of the language, and orthography means the rules of the writing system in the language. Phonemic orthography means that each sound perfectly corresponds to one grapheme, which of course is totally untrue in English. The letter “y” in the example sentence above corresponds to both an /aɪ/ sound, as in “my”, and is part of the /ɪ/ sound in the word “keys”. Those things in between the forward slashes correspond to parts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which tries to codify and standardise the potential sounds across all human languages.

Got that? Alright. Let’s go into the structure of the sentence.

First, the basic word order of the sentence. English is primarily an SVO language, which means the sentence will have, in order: a subject, which is (roughly) the thing doing the verb; the verb, which is the action; and the object, which is the thing that the verb is acting upon. In the example sentence, “losing” is being done, “I” am the one that is losing the things, and “keys” are the things being lost. In something like a VSO language, the sentence may run, sans the word “my”, “Lost I keys.” This is the sort of thing that gets very complicated when you get into languages that don’t classify noun types in the same way as other languages (what’s referred to as morphosyntactic alignment), but we can’t stop now, so we must keep moving.

There’s more! The word “my” is what’s referred to as a possessive pronoun, which often acts like an adjective, and it tells us that these sorts of words appear before the noun in English. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case; “I lost keys my” may sound odd in English, but plenty of other languages put their adjectives after their corresponding nouns, and they do quite well enough for themselves.

This sentence also tells us how words inflect, which is how words change in order to represent different properties. The word “lose” has conjugated (the inflection of a verb) to represent past tense, and the word “key” has declined to represent a plural (“decline” meaning the inflection of a noun, the noun form of decline here being declension). This also tells us the extent to which words inflect in the language. Languages like Mandarin have much less inflection than English – the equivalent sentence in a language with no inflection may be literally translated as “I lose past-tense my key plural“. On the other hand, some languages (most, actually) have more inflection than English. An example sentence that corresponds to our example one may be “I-lost my keys”, or even “I-lost-my-keys”. I won’t get into this too much, but the thing to look up if you’re interested is morphological typology.

I’m going to leave it there for our simple sentence, though there’s still more I could talk about – the fact that pronouns inflect for case but nouns generally don’t and the fact that “lose” is conjugated irregularly (i.e. it’s not “losed”) being two examples. I would like to move on, however, to talking about one concept – the idea of the perfect aspect.

Let’s consider the following three example sentences.

I lost my keys.
I have lost my keys.
I had lost my keys.

The first sentence tells us only about what happened in the past. However, the second and third sentences tell us something interesting – they tell us the relevance of what happened in the past. Take the following two sentences: “I lost my keys, but now they’re here.”, as well as “I lost my keys, and I don’t know where they are.” Both of these sentences feel totally natural to read, because nothing about the simple sentence that we started with contradicts the last part of the sentence.

A bit of a side note here: the word “but” functions pretty much exactly the same as “and”, but implies some sort of surprise or contrast between the two phrases it conjoins. It’s interesting!

Alright, let’s take these two sentences: “I have lost my keys, and I don’t know where they are.”, and “I have lost my keys, but now they’re here.” The last sentence feels odd, and rightly so – the use of “have lost” is what is referred to as the present perfect, and means something that has happened in the past and still has relevance in the present.

The last sentence is what’s called the past perfect, sometimes referred to as the pluperfect. It refers to something that has happened in the distant past, and has relevance to the more recent past; consider the sentence “I had lost my keys before I found them again.”

Finally, there is something that is often confused with the perfect, known as the perfective aspect. In its essentials, the perfective aspect refers to an action viewed as a whole or that is completed. This is contrasted with the imperfective, which is (roughly) an action viewed as a process, or something that is not completed. A good example would be the difference between “I lost my keys” and “I was losing my keys.” The former refers to the action as a whole, and the latter refers to the process. You can even combine the perfect with the imperfective, as in “I have been losing my keys.” This last sentence here could be called present perfect imperfective (sometimes also called past perfect progressive), because it’s referring to the process, and it’s referring to something that’s happened in the past and has relevance in the present.

All this from a couple of words about losing keys. We didn’t even talk about complex sentences, questions, phonotactics, correlatives, moods, and on and on and on. Language is complicated. But, of course, that’s what I find so much fun about it.

And if you ever want to make your own language, all of these concepts are things you should be thinking about.

I’ll probably put up some links to how to make your own conlang at some point, but I would specifically like to credit here three sources: Mark Rosenfelder’s zompist.com, and especially his Language Construction Kit, his Web Resources, and his three books, which I have all bought on Kindle; /r/conlangs, which is a great community of passionate and conlangers; and of course, the greatest website to ever exist, the source of all human knowledge and power, Wikipedia, may its reign last a thousand years. I say the last part only half in jest – I know technically it may not be considered a reputable source, but if we’re being entirely honest with ourselves, we all know it’s an amazing compendium of knowledge.

Thanks for reading.