Actually, I have no complaints about samclem’s article about pig Latin, but I do have a question.
(I didn’t grow up ever using pig Latin, although its existence is not unfamiliar to me, so please bear with me as I ask the following.) I realize that pig Latin probably doesn’t have the strictest of rules, but when samclem says that
… he immediately follows up with “ixnay” and “amscray” (“nix” and “scram”, respectively) as examples. “Ixnay” follows that main rule, but “amscray” takes the first two letters and boots them to the end. In addition the later-used phrase, “Ankindmay isway oomeday!”, is, I suppose, “Mankind is doomed!” Except, using the initial rule, shouldn’t it be more along the lines of “Ankindmay siay ddooemay!”
Yes, I realize the final product of that last one looks and sounds odd (go ahead, give the pronunciation a whirl!), but are there myriad rules of which pig Latiners are aware… or, because of its silliness, are you pretty much allowed to make it up as you go along?
When I was a kid, we did have alternate rules for certain words in Pig Latin; one was: a word beginning with a vowel gets to stay the same, but with “-ay” tacked on the end. Therefore, “Ankindmay is-ay oomedday”.
I’m talking with co-worker (who’s an accomplished speaker of pig Latin–or so it seems when he just wants to annoy me, and won’t stop with the -ay speech ;)), and his rule when dicing and splicing the words is that he takes all the letters before the first vowel, moves them to the end and then adds the ubiquitous “ay”. School, for example, then becomes oolschay. This, I suppose, is what accounts for amscray.
As for when a word begins with a vowel, if that vowel is the only, lonely one, he normally leaves it in place and simply adds an “ay” to the end. Inn, therefore, becomes innay. Unicorn, however, transforms into the mighty icornunay.
I dunno… maybe he speaks a variant, a sub-dialect: pork chop Latin.
I grew up with the rules you’ve just described, SkipMagic. Its the first set of consonants that move, not the first letter. Short words that start with a vowel (such as “is”) were generally left as-is. I’m not sure about longer ones …
Me, too. Except . . . I don’t remember words like “unicorn” – words that begin with vowels but whose initial sound is really consonantal – being specifically addressed in my Intro to Pig Latin course. On thinking it over, I realized that if I had to say ‘unicorn’ in Pig Latin, I would say ‘oonicornyay.’ Perhaps this is a regional dialect.
One of my favorite CDs is a Gregorian chant done at least partially in Pig Latin. It is about a day on the farm. In the beginning the pigs are sleeping and so the chant begins:
The name of the CD is Grunt. It comes complete with translation and is gloriously funny.
My brother and I were relatively fluent and could hold full conversations that mystified most listeners (other than our father who, unfortunately, was nearly as fluent). The rather loose rules we used were often phonetic rather then spelling based, but this varied. So, for example, “hour” might become “our-way” (we used the -way rule for vowel sounds) rather then “our-hay” because the word started with a vowel sound. But other times it might be “our-hay”. I can’t explain when or why we varied it. It was done without much thought and probably was based on what flowed off the tounge most easily or sounded better in a given context. As far as I can recall, we always combined leading consonants so, for example, “scram” became “am-scray” rather than “cram-say” and “the” became “u-thay” or “ee-thay” rather than “hu-tay” or “hee-tay”.
Ginger Rogers started her career in vaudeville as a Charleston dancer and pig-Latin singer (now you know what killed vaudeville!). Catch her at the beginning of Gold Diggers of 1933, singing a verse and chorus of “We’re In the Money” in breakneck-fast pig Latin.
