Sésame, ouvre-toi : internationalisme phraséologique à contenu universel
Open sesame: Phraseological internationalism with universal content

Summary/Abstract: Phraseological units, characterised by their opaque meaning, are the subject of multiple theoreticalworks. The following article adds to this discussion by providing another interesting example. Itanalyses the case of the Arabic phraseological unit‘open sesame’ from the “Ali Babaand the Forty Thievesˮ folk tale, permeating into French, Italian, Polish, Turkish and Japanese – lan-guages distant both linguistically and culturally. In each of the analysed languages, we can find theso-called absolute equivalents of the unit in question. Their analysis shows how a phraseological unitof a meaning rooted in a foreign culture enters a language that initially did not connote sesame witha ‘treasury’. Interestingly, the analysed unit became understandable enough to be re-used in othercultural sources, such as names of public places, or even to enter the target language dictionaries.However, as the corpus analysis suggests, the popularity of the unit in question varies between lan-guages, being the most popular in Italian and the least in Japanese.

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