Vocabruary 05 - de-grafacu - description

A lot of auxiliary languages, particularly those intended for use by the Western world, have a tendency to port classical vocabulary (those terms which most European languages have in common borrowed mainly from Latin and Greek) directly into the language with minimal modification to conform to phonological and morphological rules. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what most of the naturally-arising languages did as well. That’s how loanwords work.

Most of these came into the various languages as loanwords around the time of the Renaissance, save a few words which were descended directly from Latin and then borrowed from the Romance languages. For example, this is why we say comparison – from Old French comparison (which became modern French comparaison) – instead of the direct Latin **comparation.)

Very early under the influence of the Roman Empire, however, it was common to calque the components of words instead – that is, to break the word down into its constituent morphemes and then translate the parts individually into the new language. This was particularly common among the Germanic languages, which is how we end up with some parallel terms like forgive and pardon (Proto-Germanic *fra+gebaną likely calqued from Latin per+dōnāre)

By the way, it is always worth noting that loanword is a calque of German Lehnwort, and calque is a loanword from French calque ‘copy’.

Europic doesn’t do loanwords well, but there is a set of rules for creating calques of these classical terms. Here are some examples just based on some common prefixes:

• da- a-, ad- (‘to, at’): da-tire ‘attract’, da-nunk-atu ‘announcement’
• de- de- (‘of, from; down’): de-cende ‘descend’, de-grad-acu ‘degradation’
• di- di-, dis-, dys- (‘apart’): di-skute ‘discuss’, di-romp-atu ‘disruption’
• ka- e-, ex- (‘out’): ka-spete ‘expect’, ka-tir-atu ‘extraction’
• me- con-, syn- (‘with, together’): me-klide ‘conclude’, me-sent-acu ‘sympathy’
• mi- inter- (‘between’): mi-verpe ‘interject’, mi-kepe ‘intercept’
• ne- in-, non- (‘un-, not’): ne-kont-abla ‘uncountable’, ne-kred-abla ‘incredible’
• no- in-, en- (‘in’): no-hale ‘inhale’, no-fer-atu ‘inference’
• pe- per- (‘by way of, for’): pe-gane ‘forgive’, pe-kepe ‘perceive’
• pro- pro- (‘forward, for’): pro-duk-acu ‘production’, pro-verpe ‘project’
• re- re- (‘back, again’): re-rul-acu ‘revolution’, re-plene ‘reply’
• so- sub-, hypo- (‘down, under’): so-plen-atu ‘supply’, so-swiv-anta ‘subsequent’
• to- contra-, anti- (‘against’): to-dike ‘contradict’, to-no-dik-acu ‘counter-indication’
• tra- tra-, trans- (‘through’): tra-fere ‘transfer’, tra-yite ‘transit’
• va- ante- (‘in front of’): go-va-bi-kinsa ‘preantepenultimate’, va-kombru ‘anteroom’

It is worth noting that a few of these calque elements, usually for recognition purposes, do not always line up exactly with their usual Europic meaning. The prefix de‑, for example, generally means ‘of’, but in calques it translates Latin de- which often has a meaning more like ‘down’, better translated as sotri. Similarly, pro- translates Latin pro-, while it would normally be better translated by vatri. This may also lead to doublets like de-cende ‘descend’ and sotre-cende ‘go down’, or me-no-kadatu ‘co-in-cidence’ and  me-sketcu ‘co-happening’.