Canargy: a Cant How-To
Cryptolect creation strategies (Argots, Part 1B)
Have you ever wanted to create your own argot but didn’t know how? I made one called Canargy and discussed why I did so, as well as presenting some of the results in Part 1 of this series. This time, let’s look at the details of its production.
First, for those wondering why I thought a conlang was needed at all in ChronoBlade, I’d point to their history of adding depth and richness to worlds, particularly in SF and Fantasy, across media, from Syldavian to Dothraki to Al Bhed. Second, each of the heroes in ChronoBlade’s multiverse came from a different reality: we started in Ragnarok, where Old Norse was spoken, and Thera’s world of Minova used Mycenaean Greek, while Uruapkal, Lophi’s place of origin, used Sumerian, so a distinctive idiom for Empyrea seemed in order in terms of maintaining parallelism if nothing else.
Returning to argots, they exist around the world and have for some time. Apart from the English Thieves’ Cant (which I’ll refer to simply as Cant going forward) I mentioned in Part 1, there are others: Rotwelsch, Germanesco, and шатровачки (Šatrovački), to name a few. They share some properties of pidgins, creoles, jargons, and slangs, but there are a few things that distinguish an argot from these.
The first is the argot’s crypto-ludic function, or how the language disguises meanings; this is also done as a kind of linguistic game — many words are jokes or puns. Another, more important function has been described as connivance, but drives at group belongingness and exclusion of others. A third distinguishing feature of argots is their changeability: essentially, as one of these languages’ words become absorbed into the mainstream language, as they typically do, they must continually be replaced or the argot loses its connivance function, and so, ultimately its usefulness.
Because of the unique character of argots, philologists, linguists, writers, and many others have been very interested in understanding and documenting them for some time: Cervantes includes words and phrases of Germanesco in his short story, Rinconete y Cortadillo,¹ around the turn of the 17th century, and Victor Hugo researched the French argot of his time extensively for Les Misérables, placing it into the mouths of Gavroche and others of the Parisian lower classes, as well as including a proto-Tolkienesque digression on argot in the book.²
Linguistically, an argot is a variant of a language, somewhat like a dialect, where syntax remains intact but vocabulary is transformed. Words in an argot tend to take on the phonology and, later, orthography (which in turn can further alter phonology) of the parent language. They are voracious borrowers from other languages — clearly a good way to disguise meaning — and use words of the parent tongue as well, but in unusual senses. An example of the former in Cant would be:
- Cosh (Romani košter, “stick”): a club or blackjack
The mutation of the foreign term into Cant involves several features: Initial ⟨k⟩ feels slightly foreign to English, so it is replaced by ⟨c⟩ (likely unless it precedes a front vowel, when it would tend to be softened). Obviously ⟨š⟩ is also strange, but the phonetic value /ʃ/ is common, and typically rendered in our language as ⟨sh⟩. The last syllable is simply elided.
An example of the latter would be:
- Cackling-Fart: an egg
The transformation of these already-English words is only in meaning. This is obviously an extended joke: a chicken is a cackler and an exemplar of what is produced from the nether regions is a fart. In Canargy, I took this still further by applying the Cockney rhyming slang (another argot) for fart, raspberry (with raspberry tart being the rhyme), then applied the often-used short form razz, so egg = cackling-razz. There’s a bit of anachronism involved, but I plead the crypto-ludic function of argots.
Examples of words in standard, modern English generally agreed to have derived from Cant include (with their Cant meanings noted here remaining more or less intact):
- Nark: police spy or informer
- Pal: brother
- Snack: a share, a part or portion
- Tip: to give, to pass
One can see some of our modern uses are themselves extensions of the Cant meanings: “snack” is a portion of a meal, a “tip” is money or information given.
Words like angler, bamboozle, booze, bunco (as in “bunco-squad”), cute, gibberish, goon, jockey, lift (in the sense of “steal”), musty, neat (in the context of booze), qualm, slang, sot, swank, swashbuckler, swig, swill, tippler, twig, underhanded, urchin (as a child rather than a hedgehog), and whippet, whose etymologies are either missing or conjectural are ones I’d venture also derive from Cant based on my own research, and I’m sure there are many more of which I’m unaware.
As noted previously, syntax is also provided by the parent language, as can be seen in a few examples:
Flick me some panam and caffan.
Cut me some bread and cheese.Twig the cull, he’s peery.
Observe the fellow, he is watching us.The mort’s frenchified.
The last comes from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), which, interestingly, contains a great deal of Cant. Frenchified refers to the “French disease”, syphilis, and is timely as 19th century Cant, however mort (woman) initially struck me as suspicious as it is already present in the Cant of the 16th century, and as I’ve noted above, argots are defined by their changeability. However, just prior to the movie’s setting, in 1811, Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was published and became a huge success, particularly in the US, explaining why a relatively common argot word would still be in use some 200 years later. Also note the remark is addressed to Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent), an argot outsider, and so might be deliberately done in terms he would understand. In any case: props. The work on which the film is based, Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, appears to also have captured Jorge Luis Borges’ imagination as he penned a short work about one of those portrayed therein, Monk Eastman.³
Moving on to the production of a fictitious argot, you basically decide what the influences are. Anthony Burgess’ Nadsat⁴ uses a combination of Cockney rhyming slang and Russian, with some minor influences from other, mainly European, languages as well. These made sense to the fiction he was creating. In Part 1, I also detailed my reasoning for choosing the influencers of Canargy; Victorian Era Cant and fɔ̀ngbè (also known as Fon).
In order to find the direction of phonological and orthographic change, the best source is English words derived from fɔ̀ngbè. Unfortunately, there are relatively few:
- Dahomey
- voodoo
However, even these start to give us clues: Dahomey comes from dã homè, so we can glean three properties from this word alone: there is a compounding of two words into one and an orthographic normalization of the final ⟨e⟩ — always in danger of being interpreted as silent in English — into ⟨ey⟩, and a dropping of the tonality represented in ⟨ã⟩. Voodoo, deriving from vodun, shows the characteristic of vowel agreement, as well as normalization of a long /u/ sound into an ⟨oo⟩ spelling. So this is actually a pretty good start, and fortunately, we can simply cast a wider net, looking at English terms deriving from the whole linguistic group fɔ̀ngbè belongs to get more complete information. We find our word yam derives from the Fula nyami, which lets us know what to do with the problematic consonant cluster ⟨ny⟩ as well showing the elision of final ⟨i⟩. And chimpanzee, coming from Bantu ci-mpenzi, points to ⟨c⟩ (with the phonetic value /tʃ/) being normalized as ⟨ch⟩, and a movement of final ⟨i⟩ to ⟨ee⟩.
Furthermore, you can simply invent changes that seem sensible to you. Burgess seems to have done a lot of this for the Russian words he added to Nadsat, e.g.:
- čelovék (челове́к) → chelloveck/ veck: “person”
- khorosho (хорошо) → horrorshow: “head”
- golová (голова́) → gulliver: “good”
These last two are essentially mishearings or even puns of the Russian words in English.
Continuing this process for Canargy, eventually a picture begins to emerge:
Some common word endings can also be handy — you can take English words and append them with these to alter their meanings and give them an unfamiliar look. Take these two suffixes:
- -sy (fɔ̀ngbè -si): agentive suffix
- -no/ -non: bearer
They can be applied very easily to a common English word like hat to get the pair:
- Hatsy: hatter, a hat maker
- Hatnon: one who wears a hat
However, you can’t just take the lexicon of a foreign language, normalize the orthography and pronunciation, use the parent language’s syntax and call it an argot. That’s more of a pidgin, although grammar would also have to be simplified. One of the important choices is which words you want to bring into your new language. For example, I toned down some of the emphasis on bodily functions for Canargy as it seemed out of character to the Cans compared to a lexicon of the Cant of humans of a different era (ca. 1600s) I had compiled for a different project, for which I broke down the main taxa as:
- Unsavory Folk
- Descriptions & Actions
- The Body
- Tools of the Trade & Descriptors thereof
- Food & Drink (mostly drink)
- Money
- Places
- Worthless, Diseased, etc.
At this point, it is time to read dictionaries. Take the words you like, or think you will need, apply the transformations you have created, discard words you don’t like, find new ones to replace them, etc. until you have a lexicon.
Next, do some trial runs: take passages, as I did in Part 1, and render them into your language. See how it feels, tinker with it, add words if you feel it lacks richness.
Addendum
I recently ran across a thorough investigation of how tip came to mean the money given to reward good service. Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explores many conjectural etymologies, most of which he discards.⁵ Two such canards worthy of note are: it derives from stipend, and it is an initialism for To Insure Promptness. He also runs through some great Cant uses of the term on the way to disproving its origin from the previously extant meaning “to tap”:
Colloquial and slangy phrases with the verb tip were frequent, and some of them are still around: “tip me your daddle or flipper” (hand), “tip me a hog” (shilling), “tip him a wink” (advice), “tip the traveler” (humbug a guest at an inn with travelers’ yarns), “tip the double” (decamp),“tip the grampus” (an old seafaring phrase: “duck a skulker for being asleep on his watch”), “tip a stave” (sing), “tip one’s rags a gallop” (run away; thieves’ slang), to mention a few. It is the predominantly “low” sphere in which this meaning of the verb tip flourished and a sudden explosion of its use in the second half of the 16th century that make the idea of a straight line from tip “touch, tap; turn over” to tip “give” suspect.
The association he does endorse is with the words tippler and tipsy. And he points out that tipple is derived from tippler, rather than the other way around. These words, along with terms like Trinkgeld in German and pourboire in French, imply the money given will be used by the server to purchase themself drinks. I’ll add that Cant’s extension of this specific use of the verb into other fields of endeavor fits entirely with how such languages work.
Read subsequent articles in the Argots series
Part 2A: Serious and Playful Cryptolects
Read previous articles in the Argots series
Notes
- Miguel de Cervantes, “Rinconete y Cortadillo”, collected in Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels), 1613.
- In later editions — like mine — this section was removed from the main text and included as an appendix.
- Jorge Luis Borges, “Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities” (“Eastman, el proveedor de iniquidades”), collected in A Universal History of Iniquity (Historia universal de la infamia), 1935.
- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962.
- Anatoly Liberman, “Everything is Tiptop”, The Oxford Etymologist, March, 2009.
