More Calques

In yesterday's blog ('Mouse Trails'), I discussed calques such as kenderaan pacuan empat roda from the English four wheel drive vehicle.

In fact, calques can be at the word level as well as the phrase level. For example, the root of kemudahan ('facility') is mudah ('easy'), and this seems very closely parallel to the English word facility being derived from the root facile.

Recently, Lee Kuan Yew has been visiting Brunei, and in today's Media Permata newspaper I saw him described as negarawan ('statesman') for which the root is, of course, negara ('country'); and this is very similar to the way that the English word statesman is derived by the addition of a suffix to state.

Of course, I have no evidence that kemudahan and negarawan really are calques from English. But the similarity of the derivation of these words to their English counterparts seems too close to be coincidental.