NATIVE TONGUES
I remember, as a kid, our being fascinated with the idea of having secret languages all our own.
I've never overcame that idea, now that I come to think of it, because I still get a thrill out of sending radio messages by Morse code. For some strange reason is more exciting than simply speaking into a mike and then listening to another operator taking his turn to talk. The use of code puts it all into the framework of being a “secret language” and I feel I am intimately involved in true radio at its finest.
You probably enjoyed speaking something we called “Pig Latin”, I”ll bet, which, in our version made use of a lot of confusing sounds of ”ix-nay” and “ax-nay” and sounded more like a horse language than anything used by chattering piglets. Its main use, as I recall, was to prevent younger children or girls from understanding what we older boys were talking about doing which was, after all, none of their business. We also spoke what everyone called “Pigeon English” which was modified version of what we thought Chinese might sound like, mixed with our version of the King's English as spoken in the Appalachian Mountains of the Commonwealth of Virginia. You, no doubt, remember it flavored with your own native dialect whatever that might have been. I remember I could never understand how it was connected with pigs down at the barnyard.
I faced a like problem when it came to our useful language called “Pigeon English” I never heard the birds vocalizing anything other than their constant “cooing” at each ocher. The lingo didn't sound any more like birds chattering than the “Pig Latin” sounded porkish. It was years later that I found the correct selling - and saying - was “pidgin” not like the feathered cooers at all. It had nothing whatever to do with fowl unless you happened to be buying rom or selling chicken's to Chinaman. The word “pidgin” was simply a Chinese word (one of many, I would imagine) meaning “business”. So the proper term meant “Business English”. It was the modified, cryptic and often, I would imagine, a mysteriously bickering patter when spoken by scheming tradesmen.
So much the Greek we know today is (that's “we” in a non-specific sense) comes from commercial use, abuse and mis-use of the classical Greek. We have same sort thing today in what we call “street talk”, don't we? The British still have large chunks of Cockney dialect, which is a real winner among tongues natively spoken and used to the speaker's advantage.
A.L.M. January 7, 2004 [c442wds]
