Hi.
On the point about “Ofay,” from reading Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues, I was under the impression that this piece of jazz-era slang actually was from pig Latin, for “foe.”
As in the enemies of the hipsters.
Am I remembering wrong?
**banger]/b]: << It would have been even better if anyone bothered to notice that I made the same comment on the same subject matter in the same thread two days ago >>
Your post and about three emails caused me to start the ball rolling behind the scenes for correction. I was about to post thanks and acknowledgement that the correction was being made, when this second post appeared. It seemed kinda silly to quote from a post half a mile upstream, so I just responded to the second one. Sorry if you found that annoying.
Although most Aussies are familiar with Pig Latin, I am the only person other than my dad (who taught me it) to ever use the Hulfunting language. According to him, it was popular when he was at school (war years), and was properly known as “Skid” (for some reason).
BTW, it’s not uncommon for the Vietnamese to “Pig Latinify” their own language. Being mostly monosyllabic, it’s ideally suited to the Pig Latin treatment, ie. harder for non-speakers to decipher. They use the “…ah” ending (common in Vietnamese) rather than “…ay”, but it’s otherwise the same.
[QUOTE=TheLoadedDog I am the only person other than my dad (who taught me it) to ever use the Hulfunting language. [/QUOTE]
Sorry, that came off sounding rather arrogant. I meant that I’m the only other person that I know of to use it. I’ve tried it on people I’ve thought would be likely candidates to know it, and have just received blank stares.
I did six years of real Latin at school, but I never came across *pig Latin * as a child. I heard of it only last year when one of my work colleagues mentioned it.
For what it’s worth…these kinds of language games are referred to in Linguistics as “Ludlings” and are well-documented in languages from all over the world (in a brief search I found mention of ludlings in Tigrinya, Amharic, Tagalog, Cuna, Javanese, Hanunoo, Thai, Mandarin, French, Fula, Chasu, Bakwiri, and Sanga).
Although originally researched by sociolinguists, they have more recently (in the last 15 years or so) been studied by generative linguists (especially phonologists). Bruce Bagemihl did a dissertation on them in 1988 (I think) at the University of British Columbia.
I mean that “I think” it was in 1988, not that “I think” it was Bruce Bagemihl. As a former linguist I should have a much better handle on scope. 