Carney and "alfalfa"

[thomas e murray]

There are important questions at the end of this, so please bear with me.
 Carnival workers have long been known to use an argot referred to as
Carnie--not the lexicon-based slang recorded by David W. Maurer and
others from the 1930s on, but a phonological redoing of English that
amounts to the addition of epenthetic syllables to regular words.  The
word _Carnie_, for example, would come out Ceazarnie (or Ceasarnie, or
sometimes Ceazarnieze; there's some variation).  When Raven McDavid
published the one-volume edition of Mencken's _American Language_, he
mentioned offhandedly that Carnie is sometimes also referred to as
_alfalfa_; the same offhanded reference occurred in the edited collection
of Maurer's work (_Language of the Underword_) published some years
later.  Has anyone ever seen or heard other references to this use of
_alfalfa_, or know anything of its origins?  And on a related note:  I
have a student doing a Master's thesis in which she's reconstructing the
history of Carnie, which history is leading us back, possibly, to the
argot gypsies used in England from possibly the sixteenth century on.
Does anyone happen to know anything about that argot, such as whether it
featured epenthetic syllables?  Does anyone know for sure that Carnie
existed in this country before about the World War I era?  Have others of
you worked on similar theses/dissertations that my student should be
aware of?  Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Tom Murray
Kansas State University