Engly Twenty Fido
FROM PIDGIN MACBETH TO THE DEEP JOY OF NONSENSE, WELCOME TO THE UNRULY WORLD OF MADE- UP LANGUAGES
Mr Unwin, what do you make of Elvis Presley?” “Well, from across the Herring-pole… I must say the rhythm contrapole sideways with the head and tippy tricky half fine on the strings.”
Even if the name Professor Stanley Unwin is unfamiliar, chances are you’ve seen (or heard) him in cameo roles in Carry On films, or as the Chancellor in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Unwin was, in his own words, “a masterlode of the verbally thrips oratory”, eschewing the Queen’s English in favour of a playfully knotted version, which became known as Unwinese. His favourite catchphrase was “deep joy”.
The professor’s ability to improvise a witty monologue in Unwinese was a talent that remains unparalleled. As a creator of his own version of English, however, he wasn’t alone. Mongrel languages exist in real life. During colonial times, when islanders from Polynesia in the South Pacific were enslaved, they found themselves unable to communicate, owing to the number of languages they spoke. To get over this, they adopted the one constant tongue they heard: that of their oppressors. Such pidgin or creole languages exist across the globe as simplified and bastardised versions of English (and other languages), each with their idiosyncrasies.
In the 1990s, theatre director Ken Campbell became fascinated with Bislama – the strand of pidgin English spoken on the island of Tanna in the South Pacific. For him it was a perfect choice as a world language (or wal
wantok = world one-talk), owing to the fact that Bislama consists of little more than 400 words and minimal grammar. “Subjunctives they looked into, but reckoned they’d not really brought anyone any happiness,” Ken quipped. Bislama can be learned in a few hours. And like Google Translate, it has a scrambled poetry of its own: yumitufala ( you and me/two fellows) = us basket blong pikini ( basket belonging to a child) = womb
Wan bigfala blak bokis hemi gat waet tut mo hemi gat
blak tut, sipos yu kilim smol, hemi singaot gud (One big fella black box, him he got white tooth and him he got black tooth, suppose you kill him small, him he sing out good) = piano With the help of some drama students, Ken translated
Macbeth into Bislama, taking Makbed blong Willum Sekspia on tour. When Lady Macbeth offers her soul to the devil in exchange for her husband taking the crown, the line, “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” translated into pidgin as, “Satan, come take mi handbag” (handbag being the rudest word in Bislama). Shakespeare would undoubtedly have approved.
LANGUAGES OF THE FUTURE
Authors have long experimented with their own mongrel languages. For Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell created Newspeak – a language employed by his totalitarian regime to control the masses. Through eradication of nuance and negative responses, Newspeak changed the way the masses thought. Anyone who failed to tow the party line became an “unperson”.
Anthony Burgess invented Nadsat for his dystopian vision in A Clockwork Orange – a fractured teenage slang composed of Slavic, English and Cockney rhyming slang. It’s a dialogue spoken between antihero Alex and his cohorts, which colours the regular prose: “I read this with care, my brothers, slurping away at the old chai, cup after tass after chasha, crunching my lomticks of black toast dipped in jammiwam and eggiweg.”
While much of Nadsat can be deciphered or guessed at, Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ ventures further into the dark woods. Peppered with made-up nouns, adjectives and verbs, Carroll leaves us to conjure our own sense of atmosphere and meaning, though the inference of the words is powerfully suggestive: Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe. With Carroll there’s a clear thrill in perverting language for the very timbre of the sound it produces, a practice familiar to some singers. Those unacquainted with Icelandic may presume that Sigur Ros’ frontman Jonsi sings in his native tongue. Instead it is often in his own twisted version, Hopelandic. Inspiration partly came from Cocteau Twins singer Liz Frazer who, back in the 80s and 90s, sang almost unintelligible lyrics to songs with titles such as ‘The Itchy Glowbo Blow’, ‘Spooning Good Singing Gum’ and ‘A Kissed Out Red Floatboat’. “Combining words in languages I didn’t understand,” Liz explained, “meant I could concentrate on the sound and not get caught up in the meaning.”
LANGUAGE OF THE SPIRIT
As the meaning of language unravels entirely, nonsense can offer a taste of the divine. Glossolalia, better known as “speaking in tongues” is practised by religions around the world. Freeing the rational mind through a marathon session of fast-paced gobbledigook can take people into profoundly altered states of mind. Even if not divine, are such verbal acrobatics capable of opening a portal between our rational, waking state and the irrational, symbolic subconscious? Is this why we love playing with words?
As self-styled entertainer-philosopher Alan Watts puts it: “Why is it that all those old English songs are full of ‘Fal- de-riddle-eye- do’ and ‘Hey-nonny-nonny’? Why is it that when we get ‘hep’ with jazz we just go ‘Boody-boodyboop- de-boo?’… It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world… Is this a kind of nonsense that is not just chaos… but rather has in it rhythm, complexity, and a kind of artistry?”
Stanley Unwin died in 2002; his epitaph, “Re-unitey in the heavenly-bode. Deep Joy!” Unwin taught us that language can help us make sense of the world, but there may be greater pleasures to be had when it does not.
We name things to help us understand. Philosophers such as Alan Watts remind us that the world transcends sense. In the real world there are no such thing as nouns. Your hand cannot be separated from your arm. This magazine cannot be defined without its paper, printing press, writers and readers. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is connected, like drops of water in the ocean. Language is there to be played with and turned into – as Stanley Unwin would have put it – deep joy.