I was never really good at Pig Latin. And by good I mean ‘gave a shit’.
I was surprised that after a ton of googling research, I wasn’t much closer to finding the answer to the origin of Igpay Atinlay. Versions of the annoying game played by annoying little kids, predate shakespeare, and vary from region to region.
There are a few references to ‘pig latin’ in 19th century magazines, but (confusingly) these references are probably to ‘Dog Latin’ which is a bit more cerebral ancestor of Pig Latin. John Hailman states in his book “Thomas Jefferson on Wine’ that a bachelor Jefferson wrote letters to his friends in pig latin, but it is more likely to be, again, Dog Latin. Later on he would write love letters to his slave baby mommas to keep his correspondance secretive and as “quite a dandy goof”.
Consensus seems to be that the version of Pig Latin we know today, was born sometime in the 20th century. In 1919 Columbia records released an album with Arthur Fields singing “Pig Latin Love”. The Subtitle “I-Yay Ove-Lay oo-yay earie-day” indicates that this is the modern form of Pig Latin we recognize today. I was able to scrounge up a photograph of the 1919 sheet music on eBay. Below the Pig Latin subtitle is the translation, “(I love you dearie)”, suggesting that perhaps this form of Pig Latin hadn’t taken root among the general public yet.
Whatever the true origin, my best guess is that the breeding ground for modern Pig Latin was the American schoolyard, where it remains to this day.
Please, if you have any more information, I’d love to piece this together. I believe this overlooked bit of history could land you and I the Nobel Prize, or at the very least the highly coveted Nobel Participation Ribbon.
Sources :
Wikipedia Pig Latin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_latin
Thomas Jefferson on Wine: http://bit.ly/mhPeFs
Phonostalgia Website: http://www.phonostalgia.com/fields/aeolian.html
6 comments
Tom Jones says:
May 28, 2011
Very interesting. I love your site; definitely gonna feature it on my own (not that it’ll get you much traffic til I get up and running!)
CheapPaper says:
Jun 3, 2011
Could well live in the playground. I seem to remember an English professor once telling me that studies have been done of the stories told by children. In our age of writing, he said, playground stories remain one of the few oral traditions, passed from child to child over the generations. Academics had apparently traced childrens’ story archetypes back hundreds of years. (Never understood how they did that if it was an oral tradition).
Mapleson says:
Jun 20, 2011
Pig Latin probably is a descendant or peer of Double Dutch. Both are useful when speaking with another English mother-tongue individual in front of ESL people.
EXPENSIVEPAPER says:
Jun 26, 2011
Check out the DVD called “Gold Diggers of 1933″. Ginger Rogers sings the song “We’re in the Money” twice, first in English, then in Pig latin very quickly without missing a beat. So the popularity of the “language” was around by at least 1933. The film shows comfort speaking it. So my guess is that it was around quite sometime before that.
Bernice says:
Dec 22, 2011
My mother told me before she died that her mother told her that pig latin was spoken/sung by slaves in order to confuse the slave owners. She spoke it very fluently and she taught me and my siblings.
Leslie says:
Jan 23, 2012
I appreciate your honesty and wit.