Dark Tongues

[Dave Monroe]

Dark Tongues
The Art of Rogues and Riddlers
By Daniel Heller-Roazen
Overview

In Dark Tongues, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a sustained exploration
of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it
deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to
make from it something new: a cryptic idiom that will allow them to
communicate in secrecy. Secret languages may be playful or serious, as
apparently impenetrable as a foreign tongue, or only slightly
different from the languages from which they spring.

The first recorded jargons date to the time of the Renaissance in
Europe. A varied cast of characters—lawyers, grammarians, and
theologians—denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they
served a single and illegitimate end: crime, plotted in tongues that
honest people could not understand. Before this, in epochs and regions
as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome, medieval Provence and
Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of
speech, not to defraud but to reveal and record a divine thing: the
language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to know.

Dark Tongues moves among these hermetic artificial tongues, exploring
phenomena as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech, Saussure’s
and Tristan Tzara’s work of anagrams, Jakobson’s theory of subliminal
poetic patterning, and the secret writing systems of the Biblical
copyists and Druids. In its eleven succinct chapters, Dark Tongues
advances a single thesis: that such willfully obscure languages all
rest on poetic techniques, which work to play sound and sense against
each other.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dark-tongues

http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/HELL_DAR.html