Dum Pendebat Filius

6 Comments »

1. 
   Reid Luzzader:
   January 25th, 2008 @ 20:36

   This is off-topic, but I’ve been curious. Would you translate “A sniff in the kortevar, that what you cry for, yeled? A prert up the cull, a prang on the dumpendebat?” for me?

2. 
   dumpendebat:
   January 25th, 2008 @ 20:55

   From The End of the World News (Anthony Burgess, 1983), p. 58:

   The nuclear-powered hangline from Roelantsen Station got Val to 57th and Third, Manhattan, in a little over twenty minutes. The streets and bars in Basso were lively. The rain had thickened to the first light snow. Christmas was very much in the air. There were drunks, there was violence. Underprivileged Teutprot youth picked quarrels with privileged blacks and browns and blackbrowns, jeering and provoking in their underprivileged argot: “A sniff in the kortevar, that what you cry for, yeled? A prert up the cull, a prang on the dumpendebat?”

3. 
   Reid Luzzader:
   January 25th, 2008 @ 22:07

   I had to look up argot: “an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group,”.

   I know Burgess invented his own slang for “A Clockwork Orange”, but do you think this was also created by him?

4. 
   dumpendebat:
   January 26th, 2008 @ 01:06

   Yes, he made it all up: Burgess loved nothing better than playing games with language. Some of this “Teutprot” argot is recognizable — yeled is Hebrew for “boy,” cull is most likely from French cul “ass.”

   Burgess was heavily influenced by Joyce, who wrote hundreds of pages of multilingual puns as part of his technique of depicting the workings of a dreaming mind and called it Finnegans Wake.

   If you read the 1977 Burgess novel Abba Abba, you’ll find out what a “dumpendebat” is!

5. 
   Reid Luzzader:
   January 26th, 2008 @ 18:24

   I’ve read that some of the argot in A Clockwork Orange is also recognizable. If I remember correctly, the writer said that some of it was English thief slang combined with variants on Russian words. Is that true?

6. 
   dumpendebat:
   January 26th, 2008 @ 20:08

   Yes, that’s exactly right.

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