The Anguish Languish is an ersatz
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
constructed from similar-sounding
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...
words. It was created by
Howard L. Chace circa 1940, and he later collected his stories and poems in the book ''Anguish Languish'' (Prentice-Hall, 1956).
[Chace, Howard L. ''Anguish Languish'', Prentice-Hall, 1967.] It is not really a language but rather humorous
homophonic transformation
Homophonic translation renders a text in one language into a near-homophonic text in another language, usually with no attempt to preserve the original meaning of the text. In one homophonic translation, for example, the English "sat on a wall" i ...
. Example: "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" means "
Little Red Riding Hood
"Little Red Riding Hood" is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a sly wolf. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th century European folk tales. The two best known versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brot ...
" and "Mural: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers" means: "Moral: Under no circumstances should little girls stop to talk with strangers".
Chace offered this description: "The Anguish Languish consists only of the purest of English words, and its chief raison d'être is to demonstrate the marvelous versatility of a language in which almost anything can, if necessary, be made to mean something else." His story "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" is "
Little Red Riding Hood
"Little Red Riding Hood" is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a sly wolf. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th century European folk tales. The two best known versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brot ...
" re-written with similar-sounding words (all of them legitimate words in themselves, but with unrelated meanings) substituting for the original folk tale. A professor of
French, Chace wrote "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" in 1940 to demonstrate that the
intonation of spoken English is almost as important to the meaning as the words themselves. It was first published in
Gene Sherman's "Cityside" column in the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...
'' in 1953, reprinted in the ''
San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The ...
'' and in the first issue of ''
Sports Illustrated
''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twi ...
'' in 1954.
Book
After
Arthur Godfrey
Arthur Morton Godfrey (August 31, 1903 – March 16, 1983) was an American radio and television broadcaster and entertainer who was sometimes introduced by his nickname The Old Redhead. At the peak of his success, in the early-to-mid 1950s, Godf ...
read "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" on one of his programs, thousands of requests for copies of the story prompted the publication of Chace's stories and nursery rhymes in ''Anguish Languish'', illustrated with cartoons by Hal Doremus.
[
In the Anguish Languish, a single word replaces several in the correct version (''e.g.'', "effervescent" from "if it isn't"), and sometimes several words replace one longer word ("on forger nut" for "unfortunate"). Every word can be found in most collegiate dictionaries, with the exception of "icer" (which is in ''Merriam-Webster's Unabridged'').
Although written with a serious purpose in mind, the humorous aspects cannot be ignored, especially with Chace's additions of phrases not in the traditional stories ("A nervous sausage bag ice!" for "I never saw such big eyes!") and added plot twists.
]
Bibliography
*
*
See also
* Afferbeck Lauder
Afferbeck Lauder was the pseudonym used by Alastair Ardoch Morrison (21 September 1911 – 15 March 1998), an Australian graphic artist and author who in the 1960s documented Strine in the song ''With Air Chew'' and a series of books beginning wit ...
* Homophonic translation
Homophonic translation renders a text in one language into a near-homophonic text in another language, usually with no attempt to preserve the original meaning of the text. In one homophonic translation, for example, the English "sat on a wall" i ...
* Mondegreen
* '' Mots d'Heures''
* '' N'Heures Souris Rames''
* Phono-semantic matching
Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with Phonetics, phonetically and semantically similar words o ...
References
External links
"Who Was Howard L. Chace?""Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" - complete written text, with audio link read by Vivian Altman
{{authority control
1956 books
English phonology
Homophonic translation
Literature based on fairy tales
Works based on Little Red Riding Hood