Peter Bleackley wrote:
> I've had an idea for a conlang which ultimately derived from a cant. This
> is the language of a culture of itinerant river traders, who used cant to
> discuss matters of trade with each other without being understood by
> outsiders. In time the cant developed into a fully featured language.
> Processes involved included
> Semantic inversions, eg "house" swaps meaning with "boat", "land" swaps
> meaning with "water", genitive becomes a construct case.
Rare, but has actually been observed; there's a language of Borneo where a
number of adjectives have undergone reversal of meaning. And of course
there's American slang "bad" = good
> Mixing of metaphors - deliberately confusing two idiomatic expressions for
> the same thing taken from different dialects to produce an expression
> comprehensible in neither of the original dialects.
"Well, that's so much water over the bridge" as a friend of mine used to
say.