Back in 2005 I mentioned the private language of Maurice Baring and his family, which “in the course of two generations […] had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety”; now, thanks to Laudator Temporis Acti, I can provide an example, though it’s not clear to me if these words are from the general family language, “The Expressions,” or from a childish offshoot thereof (the quote is from Baring’s 1923 The Puppet Show of Memory):
We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word “Yes” was a trisyllable, namely: “Sheepartee,” and the word for “No” was even longer and more complicated, namely: “Quiliquinino.” We used to talk this language, which was called “Sheepartee,” and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.
Neat serendipity in naming a language after its word for “yes”, a-la Langue d’oc and Langue d’oil.
It seems like an offshoot or perhaps an entirely unrelated family language. He does say „gibberish“, and apparently the family language was well developed and spoken by adults as well. It is odd that, if „The Expressions“ were really so well known in the wider social circle around the Barings, we have no examples of that subtle vocabulary.
Agreed on both counts.
There’s a reason that word-for-yes is missing from the Swadesh list, innit?
The description of the nursery language in The Puppet Show of Memory, and its banishment, is at odds with the Merton & Barber description of a language developed over the course of two generations.
The Puppet Show of Memory is available in its entirety on Project Guggenheim. It mentions nothing further than the quoted paragraph about Sheepartee, which must have been spoken for a time in the late 1870s or early 1880s.
“The Expressions” is not mentioned in that book at all.
But this blog post about the “Ponsonby-Baring Language” says The Expressions was started by Maurice’s mother and her sister “when they were very young” — which places its origin closer to 1850. The post says there are “a few pages on it in Sir Edward Marsh’s A Number of People (London, 1939), the text of which is not available online that I can find. But Jot101 quotes from it as follows: “‘..in the course of two generations (they) had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety, putting everyday things in a new light, conveying in nutshells complex situations or states of feeling, cutting at the roots of circumlocution. Those who had mastered the idiom found it almost indispensable, and my stable-companion at the Colonial Office, Conrad Russell, when asked if he knew anyone who knew the Baring language, answered: ‘I spend all my days with a Baring monoglot.'”
Do follow the link to the Jot101 blog post. It includes quite a list of examples of terms in “The Expressions”, beginning with:
Antrim Boat: ‘To be in the Antrim Boat’ meant to take a lot of trouble for nothing. Derived from a family incident.††
Arch Baker: a boring discourse.
Aunt Sister: the shirking of a social duty.
Bird: happy.
Block: to put someone or something on the block: to bring up a subject: to discuss.
And many more.
So this feels more like it is a private slang than a whole language of invented words. It reminds me of this story in the New York Times Athletic about the private slang of baseball players.
Thanks for the research and the additional terms! I agree with your conclusion that it feels like a private slang.
Sheepartee looks like the sort of thing English-speaking children might invent, but Quiliquinino has a Spanish look about it. It reminds me of Quilicura, part of Santiago (Chile), fairly close to the airport. I’m sure if I’ve ever been there, but I’ve certainly been past it many times. Wikipedia says the name comes from Mapudungun, which looks plausible. Quili means three, and refers to the three very prominent hills there.