The flower forget-me-not is named "Vergissmeinnicht" in German and "Незабудка" in Russian. The meaning is the same in all three languages. Is this a coincidence?
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Sir Cornflakes
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Amelse Etomer
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6Calque or loan translation? – Mitch Oct 03 '11 at 14:31
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2Hello Sebastian, sorry, but I voted to close your question. I'd usually close questions like this one as General Reference, but since it's not there, I chose NARQ. The reason is that you can simply look this up in dictionaries, therefore making the question too basic and answerable with a simple link. – Alenanno Oct 03 '11 at 14:59
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I've got another one in that category, even more ubiquitous I believe: Dent-de-Lion, Dandelion, Löwenzahn, Dant-y-llew, Dente-de-leão, Løvetann, Løvetand, Dente di Leone... and probably a lot more. – Alain Pannetier Oct 03 '11 at 15:15
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2Actually, in the case of the word for "tea" and how it spread, this sort of question is of academic...er...scholarly interest. http://wals.info/chapter/138 – MatthewMartin Oct 03 '11 at 15:17
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The word « ne-m'oubliez-pas » also exists in French, but is (nowadays) only meant as poetic. The normal form is « myosotis. » – JPP Oct 03 '11 at 15:54
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2I think this is a reasonable question to not be closed. It is a 'why' question. Looking it up just confirms what the OP knows, that the same kind of thing appears literally in very different languages. – Mitch Oct 03 '11 at 16:02
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1@Mitch Personally, I think that the reason is clear enough by looking up the dictionaries: it's a calque. The answer below proves this. – Alenanno Oct 03 '11 at 16:05
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Here's another related example 'pepper' for chili peppers. The spice pepper had been known by many cultures in Aisa and had different native words for it (Latin 'piper' which was borrowed to or evolved in most European languages, Semitic 'felfel' (maybe related to piper?). But when the New World came into contact with the Old, the chili pepper (which is totally unrelated to the spice and not known at all in the Old World) got a similar name in every language by analogy. So a green chili pepper is 'felfel sabz'. (similar for Chinese) – Mitch Oct 03 '11 at 16:19
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1For me this is the exact type of question that would work best on a languages.SE and not on linguistics.SE but makes a valuable test case in deciding our scope. – hippietrail Oct 04 '11 at 08:46
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Thanks everybody for their answers so far! I understand, that my question seems to be off-topic to some of you. I think, this is partly due to the fact, that I have not bothered with linguistics before and did not know, what a "calque" is and that I can look it up. My question is answered, but I realize, that it was ill-phrased. I was interested in the stories behind it. – Amelse Etomer Oct 08 '11 at 13:44
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As @Mitch pointed out in his comment, there is a phenomenon called calque or loan translation, where a word or a phrase is borrowed by word-per-word (or root-per-root) translation. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, that's what happened here
from O.Fr. ne m'oubliez mye; in 15c. the flower was supposed to ensure that those wearing it should never be forgotten by their lovers. Similar loan-translations took the name into other languages, cf. Ger. Vergißmeinnicht, Swed. forgätmigej, Hungarian nefelejcs, Czech nezabudka.
Louis Rhys
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Very interesting... the fact that in Czech the flower is actually called pomněnka, not nezabudka, which is its name in Russian. – Philip Seyfi Oct 03 '11 at 22:46
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Are pomněnka and nezabudka the same flower? There are two similar flowers, Myosotis called Vergissmeinnicht in German, and Omphalodes called Gedenkemein in German. The latter is a "rememberka", the former a "nonforgetka". – Sir Cornflakes Jun 21 '18 at 12:50
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I tried to come up with a motivation for why this might be a loan word instead of something that people would come up with a suitable native word for. It's tempting to just say, "well that is the way it is, end of story" Here are my ideas
1 It's easy to translate/calque as a phrase. There isn't anything awkward about it and in English it forms a complete sentence. Compare this to Chinese loans to English-- they are few and become unrecognizable.
2 Plants have limited ranges, so who ever lives near that plant will likely name it first and the name would spread with the knowledge that the plant exists. As it turns out for this plant, it has a wide range, so it is possible that in some places the locals had already come up with a word for it. On the other hand, something like words banana and tea are likely to have traveled with the people who first named these plants. In the case of Tea, WALS has lots of data on how the name of that plant and the loanwords spread.
MatthewMartin
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I think, both answers are useful, but I like this one more and will mark it as the accepted answer, as it suggests possible reasons, why the calque occured. – Amelse Etomer Oct 08 '11 at 13:48
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Like many flowers, the Forget-me-not is named for its color. For unbelievable folk-etymologies, see http://symbolism.wikia.com/wiki/Forget-Me-Not
A Google image search indicates that the color of this flower ranges from light blue to red-violet. The most common Hebrew word for purple is SeGoL סָגוֹל. In second place, it is @aRGaMoN אַרגָמָן, probably borrowed from Akkadian argamannu.
In many Hebrew nouns, the aleph which had been at the end of the word (but had lost its ancient northern GHT-sound) moved to the beginning of the word under the influence of Aramaic which used aleph as a suffix for the definite article. So moving the aleph in @aRGaMoN אַרגָמָן back to its original location makes the German name for this flower an excellent phono-semantic match for that Hebrew color.
aRGa Ma Ni[GHT] VeRGissMeinNiCHT FoRGet Me NoT
The German name was translated to French ne m'oubliez pas. The English name may have been independently transliterated from Hebrew or translated from French or German. Compare Yiddish Fargesnitl. Wikipedia thinks the English name was calqued from French.
