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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 60 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

What I think is interesting about the word flea market is that it's a calque in pretty much all languages.

The Swedish word is "loppis", which is a cutesy colloquial term for "loppmarknad." Loppa, meaning flea, and marknad meaning market.
Flohmarkt in German also means lit. "flea market."
Marche aux puces is French, where "puce" means flea, I think this might be the origin of the term.
Japanese has the casual term フリマ (fleama), short for フリーマーケット, which is just the English term "flea market", there's also the term 蚤の市, just meaning "market of fleas."

I believe Portuguese calls it a "thieves' market", but Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, and Mandarin all use their own native words for "flea market"; mercado de pulgas, mercato delle pulci, Блошиный рынок, Bit Pazarı, Vlooienmarkt, 跳蚤市场.

For all of the concepts and such that are identical across cultures, few things have universal names. Typically they enter the language as loanwords as well (e.g. karaoke, from Japanese '空オケ', hollow orchestra), so the term "flea market" stands out to me. I'm sure there are lots of other similar things I'm not aware of though.


Edit: It's worth mentioning that other than Swedish (native), English, and Japanese, I don't speak any of the other languages. I've asked a Russian-American friend about the Russian term, and a friend in Taiwan about the Mandarin term. Otherwise I've checked dictionaries and the like. Don't take my word as fact, I'm not a linguist. It was just a pattern I found interesting, because the term itself is so particular. Any and all corrections are more than welcome.

I'm also delighted by the discussion this has sparked! 💖

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Add Finnish to the list, "kirpputori" = flea market.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Is tori ever used like plaza, like the Swedish word "torg?" The way I read tori in my head makes it sound almost homophonous with torg, hence why I ask.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

A number of Slavic, Baltic, Norse, (and also Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) use some form of this word for market. It originated in Proto-slavic and passed through Old Norse into descendant languages.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%82%D1%8A%D1%80%D0%B3%D1%8A#Old_East_Slavic

The most interesting thing is that the root appears to have borrowed into Finnish twice, once probably from Slavic (as turku) and once from Old Norse (as tori).

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this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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