Daily Dose of English 73
Pig Latin
Daily Dose of English 73
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dosh of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Pig Latin. What a strange episode title, right? Maybe you saw that and thought, I know both of those words, but I've never seen them put together like that before. And Pig Latin is something that is very weird, but in my experience, everybody from North America knows about it. I haven't asked people from other parts of the English-speaking world, so maybe they know about it. And actually, honestly, it might exist in other languages, but I don't know. I have no idea where it comes from. Actually, let me do a quick Google search. Okay, I've done my Googling, and it looks like it is a thing that is primarily in English. According to Wikipedia, it says Pig Latin is something for English where words are altered. I guess I haven't explained what the heck Pig Latin is. Pig Latin is sort of a language game that kids often use or learn where they change around the order of words or like the order of letters just in regular words to make them sound funny. And I'll explain how it works in a second. But I want to look, I'm here looking at the... history a little bit, which is kind of interesting, and it says that there are versions of sort of a Pig Latin-like game or thing in German, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish also has something like that, maybe Estonian, French. So it seems to be a fairly European thing with a couple of different versions in other parts of the continent. However, we're going to start by talking about Pig Latin specifically. And so what you do is you kind of just move words around and it's relatively simple in how you do it but then it ends up sounding really funny. So what you do is you take the first consonant cluster at the beginning of a word and you put it at the end and then you add an A to the end. the word so pig latin would be igpay atinlay because pig becomes ig then you put the p to the end and then you add an ay igpay atinlay and then for like hello would be ellohay right or scram would be amscray or a common one that you might actually hear is ixnay. Because people actually do use Pig Latin sort of as a part of modern culture in a way. But it's typically to say like, no to something. So ixnay would be nix, which is to say no to something. So for example, "no to the green," you could say like, ixnay on the green, or Ixnay on the eengray, right? And that's how it would sound. Typically people would just do the Pig Latin on the Ixnay, because not everybody knows how to do it, because it's kind of a mental challenge to be able to actively translate real words into Pig Latin words. And it ends up sounding really funny. because I was saying things like ends fray instead of friends or begin bay instead of begin, right? Or I'm just kind of finding random words, odd cast pay. My name is EnBay. Let's see if I can do the introduction to this podcast. Hey, hey, everyone, eh? I'm a, nam, aim bay, aim nay, is a EnBay and a, or yay, Isseningley, ootay, ayay, ayleyday, oostay, ofay, Englishay. Yeah, that's hard. But it sounds very strange, and obviously it's not English. it's not a real like nobody actually spoke this clearly it was like in its invention for a kind of a game apparently it kind of goes back to like Shakespeare but probably even earlier when it was talked like restaurants as dog Latin which is not pig Latin but similar ish right but I don't really know much else about it in that sort of sense, but now you do. You've heard of Pig Latin before and you kind of understand what it is. It's very goofy, right? It sounds sort of funny and it's not too hard to do and so you can make a joke about it or whatever, but nobody ever will say a whole sentence in it. I do also want to talk about Obinglobish as well, because it's a very similar game. Let me Google this one as well. I don't know if it has a Wikipedia article. Okay, after Googling, it is not on Wikipedia, interestingly enough, but Obinglobish does appear on languagegames.neocities.org slash obinglobish. And believe it or not, abenglobish means the word English in abenglobish. Because all that you do with abenglobish is you add an ab before every vowel sound. And that's it, right? So English become ing is the first syllable, right? There's one vowel sound, so it becomes abing or aben, since it's an E. It's just, we pronounce English weird, okay? It's strange. And then in Glish, Glish would be globish, right? Because the ob goes before the I. And this sounds very strange when you actually say something, right? So my name would be Boben. Dabe laba, dabe labai, dabos abov, aben globish, would be daily dose of English. And this is a game that I remember from when I was young. because people or other kids basically would do this. And I actually knew a few kids that got really, really good at it and they could actually like have a conversation in Abenglabish, which is really quite impressive because it's very difficult to actually do live. The example here, another example word on the Aubin Globbish website. Oops, I just accidentally paused the recording. Sorry. Another example on the Aubin Globbish website is the word bicycle, which becomes b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bicycle. Something like that. I can't do it. It's too hard. I'm over now. Ah, there it is. It's hard, you try it, huh? And I know that I've heard of other similar games in other languages. I think that UbiDubi is something else. I've heard of one in Spanish as well when I asked somebody. And they're all random little games like this where you add some vowels somewhere or whatever. And so I wanted to make a little episode on this because I think they're sort of fun, right? It's not often that you'll have the chance to learn about these really random like kids games from English because why would you? You're probably not growing up in the United States or in Canada or in another English-speaking country. And so I feel like I'll try to ever so often bring up a random little uh bring up a topic that i think is pretty specific to um like growing up in english because you learn some interesting things I'll talk about like some nursery rhymes at one point. I'll talk about like some common kids games as well But yeah, let's see do I have anything else to share about Ob and Globbish or about Pig Latin for today or maybe anything similar word games I can't really think of anything honestly. I know there's other like similar word games where you like Try to trick somebody into something. Oh, actually, I do have another one to share. I just remembered one. There's a classic game where it's more like a puzzle. And so you ask somebody, all right, give me a number and I'll tell you what that number converts to. And you have to figure out how the numbers convert into something. And they go, all right, 6. And then the person says 6 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4, and 4 is the magic number. Why is 4 the magic number? And that's the game. And so they go, OK, 6 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4, 4 is the magic number. All right. What about 9? And they go, 9 is 4, and 4 is 4. So 4 is the magic number. Oh, excuse me. I'm not gonna bore you with the details. If you want, you can try it. You can probably Google four is the magic number and find like a game to play with that. But the trick is the number of letters in the number. Because four is the only number, the only small number, I think it's probably the only number that has its own number of letters in the word, right? F-O-U-R, one, two, three, four. But everything else, one is three, two is three, three is five, four is four, right? So there's all these little differences between the numbers and so you can always get down to four no matter what number you start with. And so you can ask increasingly difficult numbers and they'll give you, 10 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4, and 4 is the magic number, right? And eventually you'll get wrapped back to 4, and you can figure it out that way. But yeah, anyways, I've talked too long for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe learned a little something about Pig Latin or Ob and Globish. And so I'm going to say, ob-bye to Yabu. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.
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