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Russian "Fenya" is a living example of something similar (applicable to the criminal/thief subculture), with bits and pieces of it having migrated into everyday
by 0xBABAD00C 9y ago
Russian "Fenya" is a living example of something similar (applicable to the criminal/thief subculture), with bits and pieces of it having migrated into everyday speech, like the word "garbage" for cops. There's a Polish, Romani and Yiddish layer in it too, which should make it an amazing subject for linguistic research, but I'm not sure if anyone is seriously studying it...
- mc32 9y agoDidn't fenya start in the black sea area and then migrate to the gulags as these elements were sent into the different kinds of gulags?
- 0xBABAD00C 9y agoI think the amount of Yiddish borrowings points to a certain region on the Black Sea coast (we all know where it points, as they would say in the city where it points). But the roots of it go much deeper into the middle ages, and there is an older layer that is less recognizable to the uninitiated. The gulag definitely helped it spread, as did the chanson style singers in the 90s.
- cstross 9y agoThis is regional slang rather than dialect, but in the UK — specifically England, mostly northern England — "the filth" means "the police" (collective noun — you wouldn't refer to an individual cop as a filth). I'm now wondering if this is parallel evolution to "Fenya" or some sort of cross-fertilization.
- 0xBABAD00C 9y agoConvergent evolution due to similar environmental pressures, I presume :) Garbage is a collective noun in Russian and can't have a plural, but in thief jargon it's used as a singular noun for one cop (the garbage is on my tail), and, hilariously enough, in a plural for multiple cops ("garbages were whistling all night in the park", it's from a song).