Fantabulosa
Nantee dinarlee: The omee of the carsey
Says due bionc peroney, manjaree on the cross
We’ll have to scarper the jetty in the morning,
Before the bonee omee of the carsey shakes his doss.
– Polari busker’s song
I’d always thought that Polari (or Palare, Palyaree, Palary) was gay slang made popular by the old BBC show Round the Horne.
Well, it turns out that Polari (“from its own word for talk or speech”) is in fact derived from the lingua franca, that fascinating pidgin begun in the Middle Ages, which was primarily a mix of Italian and Occitan – and later French by some estimates – and used by seafaring folk around the Mediterranean.
(And that, in fact, its popularization by the BBC show contributed to its ultimate demise.)
Quite a number of British sailors learnt the lingua franca . On returning home and retiring from the sea it is supposed that many of them became vagabonds or travellers, because they had no other means of livelihood; this threw them into contact with roving groups of entertainers and fairground people, who picked up some of the pidgin terms and incorporated them into their own canting private vocabularies.
However, other linguists point to the substantial number of native Italians who came to Britain as entertainers in the early part of the nineteenth century, especially the Punch and Judy showmen, organ grinders and peddlers of the 1840s.
But Polari is a linguistic mongrel. Words from Romany (originally an Indian dialect), Shelta (the cant of the Irish tinkers), Yiddish, back slang, rhyming slang and other non-standard English are interspersed with words of Italian origin.
I also didn’t know, until recently, that Lithuanian is Sanskrit’s closest living relative.
I will always be so impressed by how much I don’t know.
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Comment
- Actually, Lithuanian isn’t particularly close to Sanskrit, whose closest living relatives are, of course, the modern Indic languages (Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, etc.); beyond that are the Iranian languages (Persian/Dari/Tajik, Kurdish, Ossete, etc.), and beyond that all the Indo-European languages are more or less equidistant from it.
Incidentally, there’s more on Polari (including some great comments) here.
— language hat May 20, 2:40pm # - Sticking to the similee of languages developing like families, one might specify that modern Indic languages like Hindi are living descendants of Sanskrit, with a considerable number of generations in between. By contrast, Lithuanian is a bit like Sanskrit’s sibling, or even aunt, or even father, cloned into the present in still rather youthful shape. That, I guess, is the perplexing thing about it.
— katatonik May 20, 3:08pm # - My, my, but the linguists have a terrible way of disagreeing with one another.
I too have read more than once that Lithuanian is a close Sanskrit brethren, and have met scholars of the place who say it is so.
A quick look around seems to support it:
Sanskrit sunus son – Lith. sunus;
Sanskrit viras man – Lith. vyras;
Sanskrit avis sheep – Lith. avis;
Sanskrit dhumas smoke – Lith. dumas;
Sanskrit padas sole – Lith. padas.
Is this the new Atlantis?
— Colin May 20, 3:18pm # - It can’t be denied that there are uncanny similarities between Lithuanian and Sanskrit.
A thorough examination of the history of the Lithuanian language and grammar, including its connections to Sanskrit was done a couple of decades ago by Pennsylvania State linguist William R. Schmalstieg:
http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_01.htm
— george v May 20, 3:28pm # - Yes, there are similarities, but they’re not so uncanny when you realize they represent preservations (or parallel alterations, as o>a in avis from *owis) of their mutual ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. I assure you that if you look at the two languages as wholes they do not seem particularly similar, except that they both preserve a complicated system of case endings; this no more implies any special closeness than the fact that you and your cousin Fred happen to inherit the same green eyes from a distant ancestor.
As for the Schmalstieg article, it’s excellent and I urge everyone to read it if they want to understand what Indo-European is and how the comparative method works, but you’ve misunderstood if you think he’s claiming special similarity to Sanskrit; he’s just saying that because the case system has changed less in Lithuanian than in most modern IE languages, it’s used along with the early languages for reconstruction. In his words:
“The morphological structure of the noun, which has many case endings, is quite complex in Lithuanian, similar to that of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit rather than to English and French.”
But if you look at his family tree (the second one, with Proto-Indo-European at the top) you’ll see that Lithuanian and Sanskrit are in completely different branches (the ones headed “Proto-Baltic” and “Proto-Indo-Iranian” respectively).
Probably most of the talk about the “special relationship” comes from Lithuanians, proud of their “ancient” tongue and eager to link it with Sanskrit. But a reading of the Schmalstieg piece should disabuse you of the notion.
— language hat May 20, 4:19pm # - I like to write sans crit, so don’t mock me.
— eeksypeeksy May 20, 4:54pm # - ‘Lithuanian is essentially bad Sanskrit.’—John Cowan
http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html
— John Hudson May 20, 7:21pm # - That’s a joke, son!
— language hat May 20, 10:58pm # - Among other ‘improvements’, comments on this fine site are now Textile enabled.
— Dean Allen (Mr) May 21, 10:00am # - In “Secret Paris of the 30’s” Brassai talks about gangs of hoodlums who pushed their slang so far that they could barely understand one another. Lester Young was also known for being hard to understand by his brother and sister musicians.
— matthew May 21, 11:47am # - Many thanks for the nifty link, George. I’m all straightened out now.
— gail May 21, 3:23pm #
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