Language Creation

Cant (language)

A cant, cryptolect, argot, anti-language or secret language is the jargon [a form of technical slang] or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group. Each term differs slightly in meaning, and their use is inconsistent.

An argot (French argot [aʁˈɡo] 'slang') is a secret language used by various groups to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, occupation, or hobby, in which sense it overlaps with jargon. 

In his 1862 novel Les Misérables, Victor Hugo refers to that argot as both "the language of the dark" and "the language of misery."

Under the strictest definition, an argot is a proper language with its own grammatical system. But such complete secret languages are rare because the speakers usually have some public language in common, on which the argot is largely based. Such argots are lexically divergent forms of a particular language, with a part of its vocabulary replaced by words unknown to the larger public; argot used in this sense is synonymous with cant. For example, argot in this sense is used for systems such as verlan and louchébem, which retain French syntax and apply transformations only to individual words (and often only to a certain subset of words, such as nouns, or semantic content words). Such systems are examples of argots à clef, or "coded argots."

Specific words can go from argot into common speech or the other way. For example, modern French loufoque 'crazy, goofy', now common usage, originates in the louchébem transformation of Fr. fou 'crazy'.

Louchébem or loucherbem is Parisian and Lyonnaise butchers' (French boucher) slang, similar to Pig Latin and Verlan. 

The louchébem word-creation process resembles that of largonji, verlan, and javanais, in that existing words are camouflaged according to a set of rules. Strictly speaking, louchébem is a more rigid variety of largonji in which the ending -èm is obligatory.  Largonji substitutes ⟨l⟩ for the consonant or consonant cluster at the beginning of the word, or, if the word begins with an ⟨l⟩ or a vowel, the second syllable; the initial consonant is then reattached to the end of the word along with a suffix particular to the argot: -ji [ʒi], -oc [ɔk], -ic [ik], -uche [yʃ], -ès [ɛs], or in the case of louchébem, -em/ème [ɛm].

Note that louchébem is first and foremost an oral language, and spelling is usually phoneticized.

There is another French argot called largonji, which differs from louchébem only in the suffix that is added (-i instead of -em); the term is derived from jargon

Verlan (French pronunciation: ​[vɛʁlɑ̃]), (verlan is the reverse of the expression "l'envers") is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The name verlan itself is an example: it is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers ([lɑ̃vɛʁ], "the inverse", frequently used in the sense of "back-to-front").

Verlan is less a language than a way to set apart certain words. Many verlan words refer either to sex or drugs, related to the original purpose of keeping communication secret from institutions of social control. Verlan is generally limited to one or two key words per sentence. Verlanwords and expressions are mixed within a more general argotique language.

Pig Latin is a language game or argot in which words in English are altered, usually by adding a fabricated suffix or by moving the onset or initial consonant or consonant cluster of a word to the end of the word and adding a vocalic syllable to create such a suffix. For example, "Wikipedia" would become "Ikipediaway" (the "W" is removed from the beginning and has "ay" appended to create a suffix). The objective is to conceal the words from others not familiar with the rules. The reference to Latin is a deliberate misnomer; Pig Latin is simply a form of argot or jargon unrelated to Latin, and the name is used for its English connotations as a strange and foreign-sounding language. It is most often used by young children as a fun way to confuse people unfamiliar with Pig Latin.

Early mentions of pig Latin or hog Latin describe what we would today call dog Latin, a type of parody Latin. Examples of this predate even Shakespeare, whose 1598 play, Love's Labour's Lost, includes a reference to dog Latin:

Costard: Go to; thou hast it ad dungill, at the fingers' ends, as they say.
Holofernes: O, I smell false Latine; dunghill for unguem.

— Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare

A classical language is a language with a literature that is classical. Classical languages are typically dead languages.
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers. Ex:

Eteocypriot was a pre-Indo-European language spoken in Iron Age Cyprus. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern scholarship to mean the pre-Greek languages of those places.

...a dead language is "one that is no longer the native language of any community", even if it is still in use, like Latin.

Latin inscription, in the Colosseum of Rome, Italy

Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch

of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets and ultimately from the Phoenician alphabet.

One of the seven ceiling frescoes painted by Bartolomeo Altomonte in his 80th year for the library of Admont Abbey. An allegory of the Enlightenment, it shows Aurora, goddess of dawn, with the geniuses of language in her train awakening Morpheus, god of dreaming, a symbol of man. The geniuses are Grammar, Didactic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin.
Aurora  is the Latin word for dawn, and the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry. Like Greek Eos and Rigvedic Ushas, Aurora continues the name of an earlier Indo-European dawn goddess, Hausos.

Eos
Ushas Goddess of Dawn and Shining Morning
Hausos  is the reconstructed name for the Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn.

In Roman mythology, Aurora renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun. Her parentage was flexible: for Ovid, she could equally be Pallantis, signifying the daughter of Pallas, or the daughter of Hyperion. She has two siblings, a brother (Sol, the sun) and a sister (Luna, the moon). Roman writers rarely imitated Hesiod and later Greek poets by naming Aurora as the mother of the Anemoi (the Winds), who were the offspring of Astraeus, the father of the stars.
Astreaus, God of the Dusk
Aurora Borealis

Aurora wakes Morpheus by Bartolomeo Altomonte (1769)

Morpheus ('Fashioner', derived from the Ancient Greek: μορφή meaning 'form, shape') is a god associated with sleep and dreams...symbol of man. In Ovid's Metamorphoses he is the son of Sleep, who appears in dreams in human form. From the medieval period, the name began to stand more generally for the god of dreams, or of sleep. His name derives from the Greek word for form (μορφή), and his function was to appear in dreams in human guise. According to Ovid "no other is more skilled than he in representing the gait, the features, and the speech of men; the clothing also and the accustomed words of each he represents."
Somnus and Mors, Sleep and His Half-Brother Death by John William Waterhouse

 Somnus ("sleep") is the personification of sleep. His Greek counterpart is Hypnos. Somnus resided in the underworld. According to Virgil, Somnus was the brother of Death (Mors), and according to Ovid, Somnus had a 'thousand' sons, the Somnia ('dream shapes'), who appear in dreams 'mimicking many forms'. Ovid named three of the sons of Somnus: Morpheus, who appears in human guise, Icelos / Phobetor, who appears as beasts, and Phantasos, who appears as inanimate objects.
Admont Abbey (German: Stift Admont) is a Benedictine monastery located on the Enns River in the town of Admont, Austria. The oldest remaining monastery in Styria, Admont Abbey contains the largest monastic library in the world as well as a long-established scientific collection.Adorning the ceilings are seven frescoes by Bartolomeo Altomonte who was 80-years-old at the time and completed the frescoes over the summer months of 1775 and 1776. The frescoes depict the steps in ‘man’s exploration of thinking and speaking from the sciences to Divine Revelation in the central cupola’. ...is a monastery that has been home to Benedictine monks for over 900 years. But this isn’t just any ol’ cold and dreary monastery. Home to “The World’s Largest Monastic Library,” this magnificent library is what dreams are made of!... beauty, artwork, history, philosophy, theology.The library has seven ceiling frescoes, which are also infused with Enlightenment inspiration depicting various stages of human understanding, starting with thought and speech, through sciences and arts, and finally concluding in the largest cupola with Divine Revelation.The theme of revelation as the basis of the Christian religion is placed undisputed in the central cupola.The personification of Divine Wisdom [Sophia?] is enthroned in the centre of this picture. On her left is Moses as the representative of the Old Testament and on her right is a female figure wearing a tiara, a personification of the Church as the representative of the New Testament. Below this – so to speak the foundation of Christan doctrine – are shown the four Latin Church Fathers.

The Italic languages of the Iron Age.At the start of the Iron Age, around 700 BC, Ionian Greek settlers from Euboeaestablished colonies along the coast of southern Italy. They brought with them the alphabet, which they had learned from the Phoenicians; specifically, what we now call Western Greek alphabet. The invention quickly spread through the whole peninsula, across language and political barriers. Local adaptations (mainly minor letter shape changes and the dropping or addition of a few letters) yielded several Old Italic alphabets.

The Marsiliana Tablet, with an archaic form of the Etruscan Alphabet inscribed on the frame.

Greek Alphabet

• From the archaic period, several inscriptions of the 6th to the 4th centuries BC, fragments of the oldest laws, fragments from the sacral anthem of the Salii, the anthem of the Arval Brethren were preserved.
• In the pre-classical period (3rd and 2nd centuries BC), the literary Latin language (the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the agriculturaltreatise of Cato the Elder, fragments of works by a number of other authors) was based on the dialect of Rome.
• The period of classical ("golden") Latin (1st century BC, the development of vocabulary, the development of terminology, the elimination of old morphological doublets, the flowering of literature: Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Ovid) was particularly distinguished.
• During the period of classical ("silver") Latin, the phonetic, morphological and spelling norms were finally formed.