The Secret Anti-Languages You're not Supposed to Know
David Robson
BBC
"Since at least Tudor times, secret argots have been used in the underworld of prisoners, escaped slaves and criminal gangs as a way of confusing and befuddling the authorities. A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. Unless you yourself are a member of the 'anti-society,' the strange terms would sound like nonsense."
" 'Anti-language' describe the words spoken on the fringes of society. All borrow the grammar of the mother language but replace words with another, elliptical term. Often, the anti-language may employ dozens of terms that have blossomed from a single concept. The strange, nonsensical words render a sentence almost impossible to comprehend for outsiders, and the more terms you have, the harder it is for an outsider to learn the code."
"Secrecy was the only motive for building an anti-language. It also helps define a hierarchy within the 'anti-society.' Refusing to speak the lingo could denigrate you to the lowest possible rung of the social ladder."
Why Did "Thieves' Cant" Carry an Unshakable Allure?
Amelia Soth
JSTOR Daily
"Bourgeois readers saw a lively, colorful parody of their own world. The authors of canting pamphlets spun out elaborate fantasies about a kind of anti-society of the ignominious, an upside-down mirror image of their bourgeois world. Just as polite society was populated with lawyers and doctors and merchants, the underworld had its own disreputable cast of 'professionals.' "
"Was this fantasy of an anti-society of rogues and beggars a reflection of a failure of imagination on the part of the bourgeoisie? An inability to conceive of any way of life besides their familiar one, with its orderly ranks of professionals distributed in hierarchical guilds? Or was it a moral failure, an attempt to portray the disenfranchised in their society as cunning tricksters, who only pretended to be jobless, homeless, and starving?"
"Rogue literature imagined the itinerant poor as a nation within a nation, complete with its own language. They were no longer members of the same society as the middle-class gawkers who read about them. There was no need to feel any guilt or obligation towards people who, after all, had their own society, were employed (in a fashion), and only affected illness or disaster to beg."
The World's Most Efficient Languages
John McWhorter
The Atlantic
"If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian would win. In the simple sentence 'The men saw me,' the word for 'saw,' other than the part meaning 'see,' there is a bit that reiterates that it's me who was seen, even though the sentence would include a separate word for 'me' elsewhere. Then there are other bits that show that the seeing was most significant to 'me' rather than to the men or anyone else; that the seeing was done by more than one person (despite the sentence spelling out elsewhere that it was plural 'men' who did the seeing); that this event did not happen in the present; that on top of this, the event happened specifically in the past rather than the future; and finally a bit indicating that the speaker really means what he’s saying."
"When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself. Because all languages, are, to some extent, busier than they need to be, this streamlining leaves the language thoroughly complex and nuanced, just lighter on the bric-a-brac that so many languages pant under. Only a few languages have been taken up as vehicles of empire and imposed on millions of unsuspecting and underqualified adults."
The Return of the Repressed
Kaya Genç
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Here is an alternate history of American English: For whatever reason, circa 1920, a revolutionary leader wants to change the English alphabet for the Cyrillic one, and somehow he manages to achieve this. Fresh generations of Americans start writing the old language using the newly learned script. Literacy rates drop first, but then increase greatly, while the volume of readable texts decrease."
"Older generations of Americans, for whom the Latin script becomes a vague childhood memory, struggle to keep up and even take writing classes to be able to write in their own language. In the eight decades that follow, American writers produce great works using Cyrillic, far outweighing the Latin script books in volume. Then, one fine day, a daring American leader proposes to make it mandatory for students to learn, apart from the customary Cyrillic script, the Latin one as well."
"Arabic is one of the six most spoken languages in the world today. Unlike English, it has not exactly become the language of globalization, but it certainly has a global reach. In the past, Arabic had a strong connection with the Turkish language. Turkey’s current alphabet, consisting of letters written in the Latin script, was introduced in 1928, as part of one of the boldest language reforms in history, replacing the Ottoman script, which was a variation of the Persian-Arabic alphabet. Today, Turkey’s education ministry wants this defunct language to be taught again, having announced plans for making Ottoman language classes mandatory for all school students in the country."
Why We Love Untranslatable Words
David Shariatmadari
Lit Hub
"There is something deeply seductive about the idea that other languages contain codes that are impossible to crack. adults should know better than to believe that other cultures speak in spells. The concept of 'untranslatable words' preserves the idea that the world can never be fully mapped out and expunged of mystery. That’s a comforting thought. It keeps alive the possibility of escape - of something surviving far beyond our everyday experiences."
"It is also an easy replacement for the hard tasks of empathy and understanding. It allows us to imagine that we don’t have very much in common. It puts them at one remove, which fits with the strange stories we hear about them. It also saves us having to learn what the circumstances of life might actually be like there. If all that seems fairly harmless, think about it this way: when you believe people are unfathomable because they speak a different language, you’re just as capable of thinking that they’re inferior or evil, instead of charming or other-worldly."
There's No Such Thing as a Language
John McWhorter
The Atlantic
"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The very fact that 'language' and 'dialect' persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence."
"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on 'intelligibility': If you can understand it without training, it's a dialect of your own language; if you can't, it's a different language. But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn't apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as 'dialects' of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate 'languages' are thought of locally as dialects."
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