calques

It happens whenever a language is notable and nearby; English has a lot of calques from Greek/Latin/German/French as a result.

A lot of expressions in English started out as calques, outputs that process: you're paving the way!

As for modern English, there are numerous Celtic loanwords and calques in American, Canadian and Australian slang and dialect.

Of course Japanese is basically made up of Chinese calques and ancient loanwords, which is also a fascinating story.

We're also seeing an immense amount of calques, competing with native expressions and often overpowering them.

But in Chinese, the process of coming up with calques is decentralised, immediate, and competitive.

That said, I'm not terribly impressed that there seem to be some Spanish calques in certain Englishes.

The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e.

It got a headstart with the Japanese forming Sinitic calques as Japan modernized in the Meiji era, but then today the standard practice is to form calques for new terms rather than transliterate, which is quite rare.

For example, German has a lot of calques from Latin compounds.

Among Аnglophones, the French have given calques a bad name.

You were mentioning that Latin calques of Greek are common, which is my impression too (ἀνά-στασις → re-surrectio, ὑπό-στασις -> sub-stantia, and non-religious συμ-πάθεια → com-passio).

Basically Victor Mair's papers always come down to "I don't like Chinese characters", and "I don't like calques".

Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.

With modern French the interesting one trying to fight this sort of natural evolution by defering a lot of language changes to their Academy and intentionally replacing calques and borrowings with "corrected" versions.

> Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.