The following essay was submitted by Konstantin Andreev as a course paper in Morphology at Dalarna University, Sweden, in 2006.
In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s best-known novel, nadsat is the fictional argot used by the teenage narrator, Alex, his friends and a significant number of other members of their generation, as attested by Alex himself: “Oh, that … is what we call nadsat talk. All the teens use that, sir.’ (Burgess 1985: 126) Apart from the direct speech of the older characters, nadsat talk rather than Standard English is effectively the language of the novel.
The real-world origins of nadsat are fairly straightforward: writing in the early sixties, Burgess set his dystopia in the imaginary Britain of a not-so-distant future and naturally wanted to have the teenage protagonist speak a language that would be original, distinct, unlikely to ever feel dated – and, at the same time, relatively plausible. At the time when Western popular culture was beginning to seep through the Iron Curtain and the first English terms were entering the slang of the urban Soviet youth, Burgess envisaged a complete reversal of the trend for his fictional universe: a world in which Soviet propaganda and its attendant Russian-language culture were miraculously gaining the upper hand. He single-handedly ‘borrowed’ about 200 common Russian words into English, creatively nativised them, threw in a smattering of traditional and invented slang terms, added some archaic verb morphology and German-influenced syntax, peppered the narrative with the prophetically ubiquitous like and thus produced one of the most linguistically striking novels in English-language literature.
By contrast, the emergence of nadsat in the fictional world of the novel is less than clear. The only brief insight into its development is offered by a secondary character halfway through the book: “Odd bits of old rhyming slang… A bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.” (Burgess 1985: 9) After all, Burgess’s primary goals in writing the novel must have been of artistic and philosophical nature; he did not aim to explore an imaginary history of a fictional dialect.
Now, in plain Chomskian terms, every writer possesses full competence of his or her native language, which arguably makes an argot that was consciously designed by one person just as legitimate an object of research as any ‘natural’ product of human linguistic behaviour. One may certainly have reservations about the representative value of such research, but it is still possible to see how a detailed etymological and morphological analysis of nadsat vocabulary can be both scientifically valid and illuminating.
On the other hand, I believe that a purely scholarly approach to analysing nadsat would disregard – or even contradict – its artistic purpose and literary origin. While we must genuinely apply the methods of linguistic analysis to the nadsat data found in the novel, we do not necessarily have to stay within the real-world frame of reference metalinguistically. In order to do justice to the phenomenon of nadsat, we can try to place our analysis in a fictionalised literary context.
Being a somewhat linguistically obsessed reader, I tend to enjoy novels that have language as one of the main characters; and even within such novels, the most fascinating fragments are certainly those dealing with language explicitly. As far as I am concerned, the appendix on the languages of Middle Earth clearly overshadows the rest of The Lord of the Rings; and Anthony Burgess’s failure to go deeper into the phenomenon of nadsat in A Clockwork Orange is the only shortcoming of this otherwise accomplished novel. So, in an attempt to kill too birds with one piece of writing – i.e. both provide the novel with some kind of a linguistic appendix and complete this assignment – I have written the following fictional magazine article:
No Doom of English
A linguist’s look at the popular myths concerning Nadsat Talk
Young people have been inventing and using their own language varieties and older people have been taking them to task for that at least since the generation gap was first bemoaned by classical authors of Ancient Greece and Rome. In this country, the tradition goes all the way back to Swift and Dryden, and the amount of passion and paper spent so far on showing English youngsters the error of their linguistic ways is beyond estimation. However, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that no other argot ever created by English-speaking youth has appalled as many purists and stirred as much controversy as Nadsat Talk. People known to have diametrically opposing views on just about everything else – such as F. Alexander and the current Minister of the Interior – are unanimous in their condemnation of the way our young people speak. The harsh opinions range from “pernicious meaningless gibberish” and “bastardization of our mother tongue” (Priestly in The Citizen, 17 June 1973) to “an act of linguistic high treason, fuelled by enemy propaganda and corroding the very foundation of our society” (Murray in The British Way, 23 December 1975). At best, an informed person’s opinion of Nadsat is similar to that expressed by P. R. Deltoid in The Informer last January: “The jargon … commonly referred to as Nadsat Talk is a perfect example of a modern urban pidgin, an emaciated pseudo-language made up of half-learned Russian and half-forgotten English. Despite its exotic ring, it totally lacks the expressive inventory of either of its sources and, as a communication tool, is only fit to serve the needs of street bullies and inebriated malchicks and devotchkas wasting their lives in milk-plus bars.” (Deltoid in The Informer, 21 January 1975)
Much as descriptions of this kind may appeal to the average reader of The Informer, sociolinguistic research tells us that pidgins do not arise in monolingual communities – not even when some of their members, in accordance with the 1965 National Curriculum, have three lessons of Russian every week. Neither do teenagers anywhere in the world suddenly lose “the expressive inventory” of their first-language when they start using the current youth argot in their everyday speech. In fact, various sub-standard jargons are incredibly inventive. They are constantly enriching the vocabulary of the standard language even as used by Mr Deltoid himself: elsewhere in the same article he talks of the plight of decent young people “left almost entirely on their oddy knocky” by our egalitarian education system, apparently not realising that the wonderful phrase on your oddy knocky entered Standard English directly from Nadsat Talk.
It is not surprising that, in such an atmosphere, it took the huge commercial success of Alex Smith’s autobiography, written entirely in Nadsat, two years ago for the linguistic circles of this country to start taking genuine interest in the phenomenon. We are, however, doing our best to catch up. Our team has been engaged in field research of Nadsat for over a year, and we have already accumulated a corpus of data sufficiently rich to draw at least one important conclusion: the rumours of the linguistic idiocy of our youth have been greatly exaggerated.
To illustrate our point, we offer here a brief overview of just one aspect of Nadsat – the way it incorporates Russian words into the fabric of English speech. We shall see that, in the process, Nadsat masterfully employs the entire range of morphological mechanisms which we find in Standard English. We shall also see further proof that foreign language teaching as it is currently practiced in our secondary schools is just as unlikely to pose a threat to English as it is to result in anybody actually learning a foreign language.
The most striking feature of the Russian loanwords in Nadsat is their un-Russianness, which in this case effectively means “Englishness”. The extent to which our teenagers re-interpret – both phonetically and in spelling – Russian vocabulary to make it fit the conventions of their native language is demonstrated in a study done by Bradly et al. (1975). Eighty-four native Russian speakers, all of whom spoke intermediate-level English, were asked to identify the origin of 50 Nadsat words derived directly from Russian. Half the participants heard the lexical items as a recording while the other half were given a written list, based on the spellings used in Alex Smith’s autobiography; in both cases; the words were presented without any context. While the recognition rate was slightly higher for the written list, both groups failed to identify the Russian originals for at least 40 % of the items. Several Nadsat terms, such as spoogy, gooly, shilarny, razdraz, skvat, chasso, veck, cheena and bratchny (cf. the Russian ispuganniy, gulyat’, zhelanie, razdrazhat’, skhvatit’, chasovoy, chelovek, zhenshchina and vnebrachniy respectively), were not recognised correctly by any of the Russian-speakers.
Let us see what happened to these words to make them so difficult to recognise. The etymological analysis below is based on the findings of Paston and Dahl (1975), who used recorded field data and the Required Russian Vocabulary List, approved by the Ministry of Education and taught in secondary schools since 1965.
1. Spoogy is an adjective meaning “terrified”. To produce this, the Russian word ispuganny (“frightened”) underwent fore- and back-clipping; the resulting noun-like root spoog was then given the English suffix –y, commonly used to derive adjectives from nouns. As the spelling suggests, the neutral-length Russian [u] of ispuganniy was interpreted as the long English [u:].
2. Gooly, despite is adjective-like appearance, is a verb meaning “to walk”, as in “I goolied over to the shelf full of reference veshches” (Smith 1974: 112). The Russian verb gulyat’ (“to have a walk”) lost its verb suffix -yat’; however, the softness of the last root consonant [l’] led to the appearance of [i] at the end. The stress moved to the first syllable, and the Russian [u] was then given the same treatment as in spoogy. In spelling, the final [i] was naturally represented as y. Two-syllable verbs ending in an unstressed –y are not uncommon in English (e. g. study, carry, tally), so there is nothing peculiar about that. What is interesting and telling, however, is the shift in meaning from the original Russian sense of “to have a walk, to be out walking” to the almost full semantic copy of the Standard English verb “to walk”. A number of other Nadsat verbs, e.g. itty, govoreet, viddy and kopat, function in a similar manner – i.e. taking over the entire semantic space of their Standard English equivalents while retaining only a superficial semantic link to the Russian originals. For example, the meaning of kopat (“to dig”) in “I didn’t so much kopat the later part of the book” (Smith 1974: 64) in no way reflects the meaning of the Russian verb kopat’ (literally “to dig”). On the one hand, this feature of Nadsat may be used to demonstrate the superficial nature of the Russian-language tuition in our schools; but more importantly, it shows that Nadsat is English – only with some slightly different labels, or signifiers.
3. Shilarny, just as the Russian word zhelanie, means “desire”. Here, we can also see the Russian -ie ending being shortened to -y and the neutral-length Russian [a] being assimilated as the long [a:] of British English, which in this case is represented in spelling as ar. Another telling alteration is the replacement of the initial [ž] with [š]: it is unusual for English words to begin in [ž], so the sound was changed to accommodate the phonotactic rules of English.
4. Razdraz is “upset, angry”. The Russian word is razdrazhonniy (“irritated”), the stress falling on -zho-. Once again, we see back-clipping that cuts off the non-root part of the Russian word (-onniy); skvat (“to grab”) and chasso (“a guard”) were derived from the Russian skhvat-it’ and chaso-voy in the same way. This process, while by no means obligatory (cf. Nadsat adjectives choodessny and dorogoy, in which the Russian suffixes -essny and –oy remain intact) is very common in Nadsat. This is not surprising if we keep in mind that the average morpheme-per-word ratio for English is around 1.68 whereas the figure for Russian is 3.33 (Bauer 1970: 169). There can be little doubt that creators and speakers of Nadsat can “feel” the general tendency of English to have words stripped down to the root, figuratively speaking. Another process evident in razdraz is, again, phonotactic in nature: the [ž] sound, whose possible distribution is constrained in English when compared to Russian, is replaced by the more common [z].
5. Veck (Rus. cheloveck “person, human being”) and cheena (Rus. zhenshchina “woman”, stressed on the first syllable) are used to refer to men and women respectively. In both cases we have rather substantial fore-clipping. It is interesting to note that the clipped form of cheloveck used in Russian youth slang is chel; one can only speculate why English teenagers opted for a different version. Similarly open to speculation is the issue of stress shift in cheena. We have assumed above that the stress shift in gooly was caused by the loss of the originally stressed ending due to back-clipping. However, it may well be that the back-clipping itself was facilitated by the fact that the wrong stress was learned – or, worse still, taught – in the first place. Russian stress is largely unpredictable, and such Nadsat words as devòtchka (Rus. dèvochka) show that a stress shift can occur even if the word has not undergone any clipping. After all, the last thing the average Nadsat speaker probably cares about when speaking an English argot is observing the Russian phonetic conventions. It is therefore fairly likely that whoever first coined cheena already stressed the penultimate syllable of zhenshchina rather than the first one.
6. Bratchny (“bastard”) was created by fore-clipping the Russian word vnebrachniy, which is an adjective literally meaning “done or existing out of wedlock”, as in vnebrachniy rebyonok (“illegitimate child”). Although many Russian adjectives are used on their own as nouns, vnebrachniy is never used in such a way; therefore, in bratchny, we appear to have a clear case of post-loan conversion. Conversion is a derivational process extremely productive in modern English. The heavy use Nadsat makes of conversion can be seen in the following examples (Smith 1974): “Tonight … we pull a mansize crast” (a robbery; from the verb to crast – Russian krast’); “Perhaps you have been having a bit of a quiet govoreet behind my back” (a talk; from the verb to govoreet – Russian govorit’); “With me in this cantora were four millicents, all having a good loud peet of chai” (a drink; from the verb to peet – Russian pit’).
Conversion is by no means the only way of creating new vocabulary and new meanings to be found in Nadsat. Here are a few others:
Affixation
Yarbleless (“testicle-less”, by association with balls also “cowardly”), as in “two horrible yarbleless like eunuchs” (Smith 1974: 38). Derived by means of the suffix -less from yarble (“testicle”, from the Russian yabloko “apple”).
Droogy (“friendly”), as in “a droogy smile”. Formed by means of the suffix -y from droog (“friend”, from the Russian drug “friend”).
Rookerful (“handful”), as in “a horrorshow rookerful of like plum cake” (Smith 1974: 21). Formed by means of the suffix –ful from rooker (“hand”, from Russian ruka “hand, arm”).
Unplatty (“undress”), as in “I got unplattied”. The negative prefix un- here was added to the verb platty, which, in its turn, was formed by conversion from the noun platties (“clothes”, from the Russian platye “a dress”).
Compounding
Bogman (“priest”): bog (“God”, from the Russian bog “god”) + man. The expression itself can be used in further compounds, e.g. bogman platties “a priest’s clothes”.
Glazlid (“eyelid”). The first English component of eyelid has been replaced by its Nadsat equivalent glaz (Rus. glaz “an eye”).
Rozz-shop (“police station”), as in “we were sirening off to the rozz-shop” (Smith 1974: 54). A rozz is a police officer (Rus. rozha “an ugly face”). Another compound based on rozz is rozzvan (“police van”).
Krovvy-covered, krovvy-red and nose-krovvy (“blood-covered”, “blood-red” and “blood coming from the nose”). Krovvy is blood (Rus. krov’ “blood”).
Back-formation
Gloop (“nonsense”), as in “The Manison or the Manse or some such piece of gloop” (Smith 1974: 46). Formed from the adjective gloopy “stupid” (Rus. glupiy “silly”).
Metaphorical usage
There are hundreds of recorded cases of original metaphorical usage in Nadsat. A couple of typical examples would be “real horroshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies” (Smith 1974: 22), where pink glazzies (literally “pink eyes”) is used to refer to nipples, and “we had four of these lomticks of like Prison Religion that morning” (Smith 1974: 67), in which lomtick (literally “a slice”) denotes a session.
Unless we choose to remain blind, we can clearly see from these examples that Nadsat is just as expressive and creative as Standard English. In fact, any juxtaposition of Nadsat and English would be misguided as Nadsat is obviously a thriving branch on the big tree of our language. Research into Nadsat will undoubtedly continue, but one thing must be communicated to the public as soon as possible: rather than portending the end of English, Nadsat is a sign of its robustness and linguistic health, and those people who are now so quick to condemn it should instead be looking into the reasons why our youth have chosen to create and speak an English as different from ours as Nadsat is.
References
Bauer, L. 2001. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Referred to as “(Bauer 1970)” in the article.
Booij, G. 2005. The Grammar of Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Burgess, A. 1985. A Clockwork Orange. Penguin Books, London. Also referred to as “(Smith 1974)” in the article.
Katamba, F. 2005. English Words. Routledge, London & New York.
