Nadsat is a fictional register or argot used by the teenage gang members in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novelA Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a linguist and he used this background to depict his characters as speaking a form of Russian-influenced English. The name comes from the Russian suffix equivalent of "-teen" as in "thirteen". Nadsat was also used in Stanley Kubrick'sfilm adaptation of the book.
Description
Nadsat is a mode of speech used by the nadsat, members of the teen subculture in the novelA Clockwork Orange. The narrator and protagonist of the book, Alex, uses it in first-person style to relate the story to the reader. He also uses it to communicate with other characters in the novel, such as his droogs, parents, victims and any authority-figures with whom he comes in contact. As with many speakers of non-standard varieties of English, Alex is capable of speaking standard English when he wants to. It is not a written language: the sense that readers get is of a transcription of vernacular speech. Nadsat is English with some borrowed words from Russian. It also contains influences from Cockney rhyming slang, the King James Bible, German, some words of unclear origin and some that Burgess invented. The word nadsat is the suffix of Russian numerals from 11 to 19. The suffix is an almost exact linguistic parallel to the English '-teen' and is derived from "на", meaning "on" and a shortened form of "десять", the number ten. "Droog" is Russian друг "close friend". Some of the words are almost childish plays on English words, such as eggiweg and appy polly loggy, as well as regular English slangsod and snuff it. The word like and the expression the old are often used as fillers or discourse markers. The original 1991 translation of Burgess' book into Russian solved the problem of how to illustrate the Nadsat words, by using transliterated, slang English words in places where Burgess had used Russian ones. This solution was imperfect as it lacked the original abstractness. Borrowed English words with Russian inflection were widely used in Russian slang, especially among Russian hippies in the 1970s–1980s. Since the 1990s anglicisms in Russian have been common particularly regarding computers and programming. Future translations would simply use the original untranslated Nadsat terms.
Function
Burgess, a polyglot who loved language in all its forms, was aware that linguistic slang was of a constantly changing nature. Burgess knew that if he used contemporarily modes of speech, the novel would very quickly become dated. His use of Nadsat was pragmatic; he needed his narrator to have a unique voice that would remain ageless while reinforcing Alex's indifference to his society's norms and to suggest that youth subculture existed independent of the rest of society. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex's interrogators describe the source of his argot as "subliminal penetration".
Russian influences
Russian influences play the biggest role in Nadsat. Most of those Russian-influenced words are slightly anglicized loan-words, often maintaining the original Russian pronunciation. One example is the Russian word Lyudi, which is anglicized to lewdies, meaning "people". Another Russian word is Bábushka which is anglicized to baboochka, meaning "grandmother", "old woman". Some of the anglicised words are truncated, for example "pony" from ponimát’, "to understand", or otherwise shortened, for example "veck" from čelovék, "person", "man". A further means of constructing Nadsat words is the employment of homophones. For example, one Nadsat term which may seem like an English composition, horrorshow, actually stems from the Russian word for "good"; khorosho, which sounds similar to horrorshow. In this same manner many of the Russian loan-words become an English–Russian hybrid, with Russian origins, English spellings and pronunciations. A further example is the Russian word for "head", golová, which sounds similar to Gulliver known from Gulliver’s Travels; Gulliver became the Nadsat expression for the concept "head". Many of Burgess' loan-words, such as devotchka and droog maintain both their relative spelling and meaning over the course of translation.
Other influences
Additional words were borrowed from other languages: A hotel was named 'Al Idayyin, an Arabic-sounding variant on “Holiday Inn” Hotel chain.
Word derivation by common techniques
Nadsat's English slang is constructed with common language-formation techniques. Some words are blended, others clipped or compounded. In Nadsat-language a "fit of laughter" becomes a guff ; a "skeleton key" becomes a polyclef ; and the "state jail" is blended to the staja. Many common English slang terms are simply shortened. A cancer stick which is a common English-slang expression for a "cigarette" is shortened to a cancer.
Rhyming slang
; Charlie = "chaplain": Chaplain and Chaplin are homophones. Using the principles of rhyming slang Burgess uses Charlie Chaplin as a synonym for "chaplain" and shortens it to Charlie. ; Cutter = "money":Cutter rhymes with bread and butter, a wilful alteration of bread and honey "money". ; Pretty polly = "money" : Another colloquial expression used to describe the concept "money" is lolly. Lolly rhymes with pretty polly, which is the name of an English folk song and in the world of A Clockwork Orange becomes a new expression for "money". ;Hound-and-horny = "corny" ;Twenty to one = "fun" :Fun meaning gang violence in the context of the story.
