Re: Shelta, Polari, and my project "Nadsat 2000"

--- BP Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:

> But since I do belong to a
> subculture --
> the disabled peoples' -- the subject of subcultural linguistic codes
> interests me.  Unfortunately I can only note that at least here in
> Sweden
> there isn't very much of a disabled's slang, perhaps because
> self-confident
> disabled people is a pretty new phenomenon --
You know, I was wondering if the mentally ill here in the US had a
subculture of their own.  I don't really see one, but I have picked up
a few words used by my fellow loonies:

nut up -- to go crazy
chunk -- to go crazy
ping -- to be manic
normal -- non-mentally ill person

And you have the current 12 Step-related clichés, like "make amends",
"higher power", "moral inventory", "dysfunctional family",
"intervention"...

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia (especially disorded type) is
actua;lly invention of words, a phenomena called neologism.  (Did I
already say this in another recent post?)

> It occurs to me that in the slang of Swedish chimney-sweepers and
> peddlars
> -- now largely extinct, except insofar as it has entered general
> spoken
> language or slang -- there is a term _polare_ 'friend' which is
> strikingly
> similar to _Polari_.  Swedish peddlars' slang contained a lot of
> Romany,
> and cross-fertilized with gypsies' and travelers' language also
> otherwise,
> so if there is a connexion, it is probably there.
Incidentally, a popular slang among the younger generation of Techians,
who almost universally speak Tech and not one of the "creoles" (schools
press Tech over colonial languages and the creoles are generally spoken
by older people), is based on languages such as Romany, Yiddish and
Jamaican "reggae language"*, alongside the major languages English,
Portuguese and Arabic.  Inflection of such "slanguage" (one of my
neologisms, see above =] ) is not much different than in native Tech
vocabulary, so you can end up with a familiar English or Romance word
being altered beyond recognition.  (A real-world example, Arabic, is
"bank" forming a broken plural _bunu:k_.  But Tech is even worse if you
figure in vowel harmony/umlaut, consonant mutation as in Irish and
Welsh, etc.)

* I'm trying to describe the rap-like speech of Jamaican hip-hop, i.e.
"dance hall", "dub", "roots" etc..  I'd include Trinidadian English as
expressed in the calypsos.

[Speaking of calypsos, steel drums and all things Caribbean, see my
post in conculture about the national sport of Techia -- roughly a mix
of football, hockey and wrestling.  And I do mean rough-ly...]

DaW.

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