Fun with Pig Latin

Filter Pad’s Ouyay Eelin’fay Eemay? post reminded me of a story from years ago.

Just after I graduated High School, I went on a trip with the Bartlett High School German Club to Germany for two months — one month living with a host family and going to school, and one month backpacking all over the country. While we were there, my friend Stiffy and I, being teenage boys, really wanted to be able to talk about girls, and point out choice bits of eye candy when we could. Unfortunately, at first we weren’t sure how. Our German was passable, but not fluent, and everyone around us spoke German also. English wouldn’t work either, as Europeans tend to start learning English in about third grade.

The solution? Pig Latin.

Even after we explained the concept to our German friends, they never could quite wrap their heads around it. Meanwhile, Stiffy and I kept using it, even for normal conversations so we could keep in practice. Eventually, we got to the point where we could speak Pig Latin not quite as fast as we could speak English, but certainly faster than we could speak German.

One night late in the trip, we were babbling in our room at the youth hostel we were at before we passed out, practicing our Pig Latin. Suddenly, one of the other guys in the room broke in to ask us what we were talking about. Turns out that though he could translate the Pig Latin okay, we still weren’t making any sense — our brains, faced with a mishmash of English, German, and Pig Latin, had started to play games with us. Without even realizing that we’d been doing it, we had been speaking Pig Latin, only using the German word order for our sentences. Even our friends couldn’t keep up with our conversations anymore, because in addition to having to translate from Pig Latin to English, they also had to re-order the words to fit English grammar, and by that time, Stiffy and I had moved on to some other subject.

It constantly amazes me what the human brain can do when you’re not paying much attention to it.

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