conuly | These are the questions that keep me up at night

I can't figure out if the word "wanderlust" is a loanword or a calque. I think it must be a calque if we say it like we'd say an English word spelled that way, and a loanword if we say it like we'd say a German word spelled that way (or like we think Germans would say it, anyway).

Poll #19414 Wanderlust

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 125

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How do you say the word "wanderlust"?

View Answers

With a w at the beginning
112 (89.6%)

With a v at the beginning
6 (4.8%)

I'm not sure. I've never actually said it or heard it said
7 (5.6%)

I'm not familiar with this word
0 (0.0%)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

alexseanchai

https://www.etymonline.com/word/wanderlust

https://heatheralexander.bandcamp.com/track/wanderlust

From:

conuly

Yes, I'm aware of what the etymology of the word "wanderlust" is. What I want to know is if it is a calque (that is, a literal part-for-part translation) or a loanword (that is, taken wholesale from another language).

Interestingly, the word loanword is a calque, and the word calque is a loanword.

Edit: Sorry if that's a bit pissy. I'm half mad from hunger.

Edited Date: 2018-02-04 01:41 am (UTC)

From:

julian

I thank you for introducing me to the term calque. (Also, I'm one of the currently-29 who say it with a W.)

Edited Date: 2018-02-04 02:22 am (UTC)

From:

wendelah1

At the risk of sounding obvious, maybe you should eat.

It sounds like a loanword to me. I listened to the German and the English and they don't sound all that different to me, apart from the accent. 'Course I have kind of a tin ear when it comes to languages.

From:

monanotlisa

I mean, I would pronounce it the German way, thus the "v" sound. Unless I were with people who for specific reasons would have me pronounce it the English way.

From:

redbird

I'm not sure how informative pronunciation is, given the tendency of English-speakers (and probably speakers of other languages, but I don't know this as a fact) to alter words so they're easier for us to pronounce, and sometimes to make pronunciation match spelling. (IIRC, there was a specific and deliberate movement/pressure in Britain to make pronunciation closer to spelling. The example that I recall was that we now pronounce the h in forehead, and in the 19th century the word was pronounced "forrid."

I also suspect that a lot of people learned "wanderlust" from reading, may not have bothered looking up the meaning (no need), and pronounced it the way it looked. Some of them may not know that if in German, it would start with a /v/ sound.

From:

conuly

I AM EATING RIGHT NOW NOM NOM NOM.

From:

conuly

In this case, very informative, since the calque of German wanderlust would still be spelled, well, wanderlust.

From:

conuly

No problem.

From:

redbird

It's more that I suspect people don't realize that the "lust" in that doesn't mean what the English "lust for wandering" would.

From:

archangelbeth

...it doesn't mean "yearning strongly to wander"? O_o

From:

fred_mouse

I find your 'forehead' example to be interesting, because I use both interchangeably, although I suspect one would be disapproved of by my mother as being 'Catholic', by which she would have meant a pronunciation used in the Catholic schools, which is probably a remnant of anti-Irish prejudice. To test this, I've just asked the teens (13-19), and they are all of the fore-head rather than forrid pronunciation. So even without them having been explicitly exposed to the pressures, there is still that movement happening in the language.

The other one I remember hearing about was the change to include the 'l' in almond and salmon. Which I don't think anyone around here does (Australia, West Coast)

From:

movingfinger

Wanderlust means desire to travel, but not with the overpowering compulsion that the English word "lust" connotes. "Lust" in German is a broader word for pleasure, zest, relish, even just fancying something whimsically. Usage in the two languages is probably makes this a distinction without a real difference.

From:

conuly

Learning that people used to say forrid suddenly made "There was a little girl/with a little curl" ever so much more poetic.

From:

moem

I'm not sure what sound /v/ indicates. I say wanderlust with a w, just like all the Germans I know. But English is as much of a foreign language to me as German is, and I believe that the way Germans say the w sounds a bit v-ish to native English speakers' ears. Is that right?

From:

conuly

A v in English is a voiced labiodental fricative - that is, it's like an f, but with voicing. Labiodental means you make the sound (phoneme) by touching your top teeth to your bottom lip. Fricative means you only slow the airflow a little bit as you make (articulate) the phoneme. And voiced, of course, means you use your vocal cords :)

A w in English is a voiced labial-velar approximant. Labial-velar means you round the lips (labial) while moving the back of the tongue towards the soft palate, or velum. Approximant means you barely stop the airflow at all - indeed, w is considered a semivowel.

We can describe all consonants in this method, and put them on a neat chart. Voiced or unvoiced, place of articulation, manner of articulation.

Edited Date: 2018-02-04 10:40 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

Sorry if you know all that. I never remember who knows just what.

From:

moem

I don't know shit about these things and you lost me at fricative. I just know that it's a w and it sounds like a w. I may not be the right person to discuss the topic with and I'll bow out now.

From:

conuly

Wait, you got past labiodental!?

LOL. "Fricative" just means a sound like f or s. When you say those sounds, you can put your hand in front of your mouth and feel the breath escaping. Try it with s.

But if you kept your tongue in the exact same place and stopped your breath entirely as you made the sound, you'd be saying t t t instead. That's called a "stop", or sometimes a "plosive". But stop is a better term.

If you kept your tongue in the same place still, and this time redirected your breath through the nose and used your voice, you'd be saying n. That's a nasal.

These three sounds all have the same place of articulation - you make them by putting your tongue in the same place. But they are distinguished by their manner of articulation - how you make the sounds, what you do to the airflow.

(Now I'll say sorry again. It's very very hard to shut me up once I get started.)

Edited Date: 2018-02-04 10:56 am (UTC)

From:

moem

I was trying to indicate that I don't really want to know. Sorry if I made you waste your time.

From:

hannah

If Joni Mitchell sings it with a W, that's good enough for me.

From:

hudebnik

Interesting. In general, American English speakers import foreign words with their pronunciation (mostly) intact, which leads to a very weird and inconsistent spelling-to-pronunciation mapping; English English speakers, by contrast, import foreign words by spelling, and then pronounce them (mostly) the way they would if they were English words to begin with. (Yes, there are a lot of dialects of "English English", and I don't know enough about them to say which follow this pattern; I'm referring to the standard BBC English.) The classic example is "garage".

"Wanderlust" seems like an exception: I think most American English speakers who use the word know (or believe) that it's of German origin, but nonetheless pronounce it as though a word spelled that way had been English all along.

From:

chickenfeet

Lots of examples of pronunciation being moved closer to spelling. Oddly I'm extremely inconsistent on this.

I say "forrid"
I say "med'cn" whereas the 3 syllable version seems to have become more common
I say "sold-jer" with an L, not the older "sojer"

usw

From:

chickenfeet

I'm definitely of the German persuasion on this. Maybe because I speak some German and listen to it a lot; mostly in art song which means I have a very odd vocabulary. I'd struggle to remember the german for "cutlery" but know the word for a hurdy-gurdy player.

From:

oloriel

Amusingly enough, when I use wanderlust as an English word, I pronounce it with a [w] (as well as darkening the a and pronouncing the u as [ʌ]). I suspect I'm subconsciously trying to avoid sounding German when speaking English?

From:

conuly

"Wanderlust" seems like an exception: I think most American English speakers who use the word know (or believe) that it's of German origin, but nonetheless pronounce it as though a word spelled that way had been English all along.

The poll certainly would seem to confirm this. Which does make it a calque.

From:

conuly

That's fascinating.

From:

muninnhuginn

As an English-English speaker (of the Northern persuasion), I have to quibble with the notion of BBC English: the BEEB these days allow far more variation than they used to, and I suspect aren't a standard anything at all.

Meanwhile, "garage" is pronounced to rhyme with "marriage" (except when making jokes about Nigel Farage). And "forehead" is "forrid" for me, but I'm old and probably learned it via the rhyme in the nursery rhyme--and no child in England these days would know that nursery rhyme: if it's not "The Wheels on the bus" or "Twinkle twinkle", it's not in their repertoire. Sadly. Our folk history is much impoverished.

From:

elenbarathi.livejournal.com

It's a loanword, not a calque. A calque is a literal translation; wanderlust is the exact same word, regardless of the accent with which it's pronounced. English and German are first cousins anyway, and have quite a few words in common - not necessarily because they were loaned or borrowed; just because they grew from the same Anglo-Saxon roots

From:

jesse_the_k

Ah!

From:

darkoshi

Half my family is German, and I speak it, so I know how it is pronounced in German. But I would never think of pronouncing it that way in English; I don't think anyone here would understand it that way. I'm pretty sure I've only ever heard it in English with the 'w' sound and American pronunciation... Can't use the 'w' with a German 'a' sound, as then it would sound like "wonder", not "wander". Though thinking about it now, I'm not sure I've really ever heard the word in English (as opposed to reading it), because the "lust" part of the word would sound weird no matter how pronounced.

From:

oloriel

In the R.E.M. song "Wanderlust", it's duly pronounced as "wonderlost". ;)

From:

oloriel

That said, I'm really not sure that pronunciation is the key here. I mean, I've heard wunderkind pronounced like a compound of English "wonder" and "kind", even though the latter does not actually mean "child" in English...

From:

oloriel

Lust on its own can just mean "feel like doing something", really. You could ask someone Hast du Lust, Schwimmen zu gehen? and it wouldn't mean "are you lusting after a swim", but just "do you feel like going for a swim?". You could have "Lust" to do a lot of things - like reading a book, shopping, going for a walk or watching TV without being compelled to do all (or any) of them. It can also be used in the sense of motivation.

But in Wanderlust, there actually is an element of being compelled, at least in modern useage - though it's not actually all that commonly used anymore. Although it has slightly different connotations, today one would be more likely to speak of being urlaubsreif, i.e., "ripe for a vacation". XD

From:

hudebnik

As you probably know, in American English, "garage" and "barrage" are both near-universally pronounced with a soft "zh" sound and the accent on the second syllable.

I'd never heard "forrid" until probably high school or college, and then only as an explanation for the nursery rhyme.

From:

darkoshi

Hah, it figures. Now I have to go listen to that song and to the Joni Mitchell one mentioned above.

From:

darkoshi

To me, Joni Mitchell's pronunciation sounds like the normal American pronunciation of "wander" & "lust", like I was originally thinking.
It's also that way in 2 other songs I found:
Blackbear - Wanderlust
The Weeknd - Wanderlust
R.E.M's pronunciation also sounds the same to me, although with a slightly different accent.

Edited (changed the Blackbear link; the image on the original video disturbed me and the new link has an actual video) Date: 2018-02-05 02:34 pm (UTC)

From:

penpusher

Gordon Lightfoot - "Carefree Highway"

Although can we trust the Canadians to come oot with the right pronunciation?

From:

darkoshi

I wouldn't have been able to tell that he's Canadian from his accent on that song. He seems to pronounce it the same way as the others. I've always misheard those lyrics as "Every highway".

From:

conuly

Riiiiiiiiight, but the literal translation of "wander" is "wander", and the literal - if somewhat old-fashioned - translation of "lust" is "lust", so.

From:

elenbarathi.livejournal.com

Wanderlust was definitely borrowed from the German, but both wander and lust are Old English:

Origin and Etymology of wander:
Middle English wandren, from Old English wandrian; akin to Middle High German wandern to wander, Old English windan to wind, twist

Origin and Etymology of lust:
Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old High German lust pleasure and perhaps to Latin lascivus wanton