Re: Cants

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Peter Bleackley wrote:

> Does anybody know anything about cants (ie deliberately obfuscated in-group
> dialects and languages). I'd particulary like to know about the processes
> involved in deriving them from "normal" languages. The one I'm most
> familiar with is Cockney rhyming slang, whose normal formation process was
> find a stock phrase that rhymes with the target word, and then drop the
> rhyming part.
I think the drop the rhyming part is a more recent innovation. The
convicts brought it over to Australia and for some reason it gets taught
it primary school, even though no-one uses it except when talking of
dogseye with deadhorse (meat pie with sauce (ketchup for you Americans)).
In this version, the rhyming element is retained. (On a side note,
apparently I've been decitizenified because I don't like either meat pies*
or tomato sauce.)

Of course, I could be entirely wrong.

* Meat pies are a specific kind of pies. Basically, they take the meat
  that's left over after they've made the sausages, mince mean, dogfood
  etc., mix it in with something they pass off as gravy, and shove it into
  a pie. They serve one person. There's also party pies, which are a
  similar idea except they're much smaller.

  I have nothing against a pie whose main ingredient happens to be mince
  meat.

> I've also heard of Polari, which I believe is generally along
> the lines of "How bona it is to gander your eek!"
Well, there's always pig latin (or igpay atinlay), where you take the
first letter of the word (or consonant cluster perhaps), shove it at the
end, and add ay. Something funny happens with words that begins with
vowels too.

--
Tristan

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