"A Clockwork Orange" романындағы жасанды тіл: Надсат

Fictional language in the novel "A Clockwork Orange"

Nadsat is a fictional register or argot used by the teenage gang members in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A 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 ( надцать, nad·tsat). Nadsat was also used in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the book.

Nadsat is a mode of speech used by the nadsat, members of the teen subculture in the novel A 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 ( надцать). 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 derived from the Welsh word drwg, meaning 'bad', 'naughty' or 'evil' and the Russian word друг, meaning a 'close friend'. Some of the words are almost childish plays on English words, such as eggiweg ('egg') and appy polly loggy ('apology'), as well as regular English slang sod 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's 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 onesfor example, droogs became фрэнды (frendy). Borrowed English words with Russian inflection were widely used in Russian slang, especially among Russian hippies in the 1970s–1980s.

Burgess was a polyglot who loved language in all its forms. However, he realized that if he used contemporary slang, the novel would very quickly become dated, owing to the way in which teenage language is constantly changing. He was therefore forced to invent his own vocabulary, and to set the book in an imaginary future. Burgess was later to point out that, ironically, some of the Nadsat words in the book had been appropriated by American teenagers, "and thus shoved [his] future into the discardable past." 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 was independent from the rest of society. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex's interrogators describe the source of his argot as "subliminal penetration".

Aggeler, Geoffrey. "Pelagius and Augustine in the novels of Anthony Burgess". English Studies 55 (1974): 43–55. Burgess, Anthony (1990). You've Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. . Gladsky, Rita K. "Schema Theory and Literary Texts: Anthony Burgess' Nadsat. Language Quarterly 30:1–2 (Winter–Spring 1992): 39–46.