Semantic transfer is the transfer of semantic structure (that is, meaning) from one language to another. Semantic transfer is often divided into loan-translation (sometimes called “calquing”) and loan-shifting. In loan-translation, often used in compound words, the semantic structure is transferred via word-for-word translation from one language into another. In other words, native words retain their original meanings and combine in new ways to express an idea from the model language. For example, laksørret in American Norwegian (literally ‘salmon+trout’) is a loan-translation of ‘salmontrout,’ one of the various American English words for steelhead, an anadromous type of rainbow trout. Haugen (1956: 48) gives the Spanish example of casa de corte ‘court house,’ where the idea of a ‘court house’ has been loaned into Spanish, but is expressed using pre-existing Spanish lexical items. Loan-shifting, on the other hand, applies a new meaning to a native word that has the same phonological shape as a word in the model language. Haugen (1956: 52) gives the example: Du må stikke til det ‘you’ve gotta stick to it.’ The verb stikke means ‘to stick/stab with a pointed object’ just like it can in English. However, the idiomatic usage of stikke meaning ‘to be persistent’ in this particular phrase is not part of the original Norwegian meaning; stikke has been used only because of the similarity in sound to the English model. Because both loan-shifts and loan-translations use an existing native word or words to express a new, foreign, concept that has been transferred from the model language, we use the term ‘semantic transfer’ to cover both phenomena. Table 1 above shows how loan-shifts and loantranslations both involve semantic transfer but differ based on pre-existing overlap in phonemic structure.