Carny Lingo

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:00:26 -0500, Wells Darla L <dlw3208 at LOUISIANA.EDU>
wrote:
>
>Those aren't too bad. They leave out a few things and they overemphasize
>some of the older, more obscure material, but on the whole, they are
>fairly accurate. One thing they don't emphasize much is the form of pig
>latin they speak and also the fact that kizzarney has been considered by
>most of its practictioners for at least 20 years that I know of to be a
>dying language.

Welcometothefair.com calls it "ciazarn", and Keyser goes into more detail
at the end of his list:

-----
http://www.goodmagic.com/carny/carny2.htm

~  Ciazarn ("Carny Talk)" ~

Oh, yeah 
 one more thing:

"Carny," also known as "Ciazarn" — A special code language (a cant,
really; only a "language" in the sense that pig-latin is a language) to be
used when they don't want anyone outside the business (that probably means
you, pal) to know what they're saying.

A little like pig-latin, and so closely related to "Double Dutch" as to be
almost identical, you insert an invariant nonsense syllable after each
consonant. In Carny, the syllable is always "eaz", pronounced "ee-uz." If,
for example, you wanted to say, "Can we take this hick?" It would come out
(hard C) "Ceaz-an weaz-e teaz-ake theaz-is heaz-ick?"

You can hear quite a stretch of it in the old disco record "Double-Dutch
Bus", and it seems to be one (among many) components of ghetto "gangsta
slang."

Carny was once common inside the ring among wrestlers and referees, very
much like Pig-Latin where a syllable is added to any word — "finish" being
turned into "fee-ya-zin-ish" or "gimmick" being turned into
"Gee-ya-zimmick." Sometimes used by fans who want to be accepted as
"insiders," generally resulting in snickering as soon as they leave the
room.
-----

So in ASCII-ized IPA, "ciazarn" is pronounced [ki at zArn] (or [ki at zA:n] for
non-rhotics), namely "carn" [kArn] (or [kA:n]) with an infixed [i at z]. Is
it fair to assume that the diphthong in [i at z] is evidence that the
pig-Latin developed in the South, where an "-izz-" /Iz/ infix would be
tensed to [i at z] according to the Southern Shift?

In her 1960 article "Carnival Talk" (AmSp 35:4), Louise M. Ackerman calls
this "Z-Latin". It's also discussed by Carol Russell and Thomas Murray
here:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_speech/v079/79.4russell.pdf

And there's a little more on it here (where it's called "Cazarny"):

http://linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-764.html

I don't see anything about Keyser's claim that the pig-Latin is one of the
forerunners of hiphop slizzang, but that seems plausible.


--Ben Zimmer