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.’
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!
Pretty much anything in katakana in Japan is loanwords.
Very interesting about flew markets though, Norway is the same as Sweden here.
thieves market
I’ve definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.
Aha! See, my first thought was that maybe it had something to do with pickpockets being present!
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).
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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.
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…
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
English is not a language.
English is 6 drunk raccoons driving an M1 Abrams through a Wendy’s drivethru.
Hey that’s the raccoon whisperer but Soldier from TF2. I’ve never seen that, that’s great.
I did nothing, but fed raccoons for three days
English is a germanic language. Is loanword an actual calque, and not an “evolved” version of a root word?
No, it was imported from German. Frisian and Dutch have “lienwurd” and “leenwoord” too (also calqued from German)
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.
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.
Every language has these. Chinese prefers calques to loanwords, but even it has 浪漫 lang4man4 romantic
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.
There’s no perhaps about it.
Lots of !badlinguistics in this thread (but some goodlinguistics too though!).
this reminds of that one conversation i had with a user trying to one up me on the semantic stupidity of the english language.
Like it’s great that you’re multi-lingual, please never try to argue something for the english language, even if you only speak english. It makes you look stupid.
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
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.
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.
yawn
