To do so, for example, you could take off the final sound of a word and add the suffixes -us, -ium or -icus to give you words that resemble actual Latin phrases - words like pencilicus, Instagramus or backpackium. Dog Latin takes English words and treats them as if they were Latin words by conjugating and declining them in the same way you’d do if you were a speaker of the tongue a few millennia ago (or in high school Latin class a few years ago). It’s also known today as “Cod Latin,” “macaronic Latin,” “mock Latin” or “Canis Latinicus,” but it was called “Pig Latin” or “Hog Latin” centuries ago.ĭog Latin isn’t a code as much as Pig Latin is, but it does involve altering English words so they’re just recognizable. More closely related to actual Latin of ancient times is Dog Latin, though it’s a bit less recognizable to the average person. And “Pig Latin” used to refer to some other altered English entirely - what we today would call “Dog Latin.” How Is Pig Latin Different From Dog Latin? The name is an intentional misnomer the “Latin” doesn’t have to be Latin at all, and no one’s exactly sure why the “Pig” couldn’t be a “Donkey,” “Goat,” or “Emu” instead. Plenty have tried to understand or contextualize the etymology of the name “Pig Latin” to little avail. And today, there are even Pig Latin-to-English translators you can use. It was highly popular in the 1920s and ‘30s, and over the past decades it’s given English words that are now in the public lexicon, like ixnay (“nix”) and amscray (“scram”). Pig Latin has been around for centuries in some form or another Thomas Jefferson is rumored to have written letters in the coded language (though it’s more of a rumor than a claim substantiated by hard evidence). It’s often easier just to say it out loud.) (As you can see, trying to write down Pig Latin takes a little finessing to preserve the same sounds. → Et’s-lay atch-way at-thay ovie-may onight-tay. Can you speak Pig Latin? → An-cay ou-yay eak-spay ig-pay atin-lay?.You can use this system to translate and decipher entire sentences: If the original word starts with a vowel, some people add -way to the end of just stick with -ay, making a word like igloo into either igloo-way or igloo-ay. That means the word dog becomes ogday or speak becomes eakspay (or peaksay, depending on which variant of Pig Latin you’re used to). Typically, this means taking the beginning consonant or consonant cluster of the first syllable of an English word (what in linguistics speak is called the “onset” of the syllable), moving it to the end of the word, and adding some sort of vowel sound, most often -ay. Traditional Pig Latin involves altering English words so that they’re still intelligible to the trained ear but sound like English-adjacent near-nonsense to someone who’s never heard it before. Pig Latin is so ubiquitous because it’s not hard to learn at all. Linguists typically agree that it’s more appropriate to call something like Pig Latin a code rather than a language, much in the way Morse code and Braille are codes (they can also any language, not just English). It’s wacky wordplay, more of a constructed language game than anything else. ![]() What Is Pig Latin?ĭon’t let its name confuse you Pig Latin is unrelated to the tongue spoken by the Romans of antiquity. Read on to find out about Pig Latin and other coded language games throughout the linguistic world. And these types of games aren’t English-exclusive either, though not all of them play off of Latin necessarily. ![]() Though Pig Latin is by no means a direct derivation of actual Latin, there are other “languages” out there that actually do hearken back to that ancient language of the Roman Empire by altering an English root word. It can be immensely entertaining to confuse others as they try to pick apart the cryptic messages you create. This coded language is one of many that exist today where systems of writing and speech that are altered or camouflaged (some might say corrupted) versions of real, everyday languages became a sort of secret jargon within an exclusive group. But if you’ve ever played word games with kids or needed to communicate more covertly than usual, you might recognize this argot called Pig Latin. Ou-day ou-yay ow-knay at-whay is-thay ays-say? That might look like alien gobbledygook to the unfamiliar eye.
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