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  • Well, it's not a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/calque. It's calques which are Anglicised (or, in other languages, adapted to that language). Loan words retain the morphology of the other language, as in our Tagalog examples above (although some got corrupted and subtly changed), whereas calques of, usually, compound expressions, get translated bit by bit, e.g. in this example the result would be 'guest worker'.

    Ballard simply gave the loan word an English plural. This isn't mandatory (e.g., see some loan words in the list here) and by itself doesn't Anglicise the term. I would say it's probably more common in German to have words whose singular and plural are identical, although that's just a hunch. There just don't seem to be as many in English, and it is quite natural for Ballard to follow the convention he does follow. Still, given that it's perfectly possible to retain the original plural in English, it jars a bit.

    Out of interest, does Ballard retain the initial capital?

    Some Gastarbeiter the other day.

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