Acceso usuarios
Innere Stadt, Austria
The present article elucidates the origin of the French idiom tirer une lettre de change sur qqn. ‘to draw a bill of exchange on sb.’, which is totally opaque from a synchronic point of view. It is shown that the idiom arose by way of a metonymic shift from the collocation tirer une somme d’argent (par lettre de change) ‘to draw a sum of money (by means of a bill of exchange)’, where tirer roughly meant ‘to bring back home’. This use of tirer, furthermore, is identified as a loan translation of the synonymous Italian verb trarre ‘to draw’, while the metonymic shift occurred in French and was only later on loan-translated back into Italian.
