A cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group. It may also be called a cryptolect , argot , pseudo-language , anti-language or secret language . Each term differs slightly in meaning; their uses are inconsistent. Richard Rorty defines cant by saying that "'Cant', in the sense in which Samuel Johnson exclaims, 'Clear your mind of cant,' means, in other words, something like that which 'people usually say without thinking, the standard thing to say, what one normally says'." In Heideggerian terms it is what "das Man" says.
24-661: [REDACTED] Look up cant in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Cant , CANT , canting , or canted may refer to: Language [ edit ] Cant (language) , a secret language Beurla Reagaird , a language of the Scottish Highland Travellers Scottish Cant , a language of the Scottish Lowland Travellers Shelta or the Cant,
48-414: A suffix to coin names for modern-day jargons such as "medicant", a term used to refer to the type of language employed by members of the medical profession that is largely unintelligible to lay people. The thieves' cant was a feature of popular pamphlets and plays, particularly between 1590 and 1615, but continued to feature in literature through the 18th century. There are questions about how genuinely
72-427: A word sense is one of the meanings of a word . For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word " play ", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence , as follows: We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater. The coach devised a great play that put the visiting team on the defensive. The children went out to play in
96-604: A commune in Ariège, France Canter (disambiguation) Canticle Kant (disambiguation) Kante (disambiguation) Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Cant . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cant&oldid=1259749501 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
120-493: A language of the Irish Travellers Thieves' cant , a language of criminals Canting arms , heraldic puns on the bearer's name Can't , contraction of cannot Other uses [ edit ] Cant (architecture) , part of a facade CANT (aviation) ( Cantieri Aeronautici e Navali Triestini ), an aircraft manufacturer Cant (log) , a log partially processed in a sawmill Cant (road/rail) , an angle of
144-562: A lay audience as " spelling ", but in linguistic usage "orthography" (comprising spelling, casing , spacing , hyphenation , and other punctuation ) is a hypernym of "spelling". Besides jargon, however, the pattern is common even in general vocabulary. Examples are the variation in senses of the term "wood wool" and in those of the word "bean" . This pattern entails that natural language can often lack explicitness about hyponymy and hypernymy . Much more than programming languages do, it relies on context instead of explicitness; meaning
168-895: A means to prevent outsiders from understanding their communication and as a manner of establishing a subculture that meets the needs of their alternative social structure. Anti-languages differ from slang and jargon in that they are used solely among ostracized social groups, including prisoners, criminals, homosexuals, and teenagers. Anti-languages use the same basic vocabulary and grammar as their native language in an unorthodox fashion. For example, anti-languages borrow words from other languages, create unconventional compounds, or utilize new suffixes for existing words. Anti-languages may also change words using metathesis , reversal of sounds or letters (e.g., apple to elppa ), or substituting their consonants. Therefore, anti-languages are distinct and unique and are not simply dialects of existing languages. In his essay "Anti-Language", Halliday synthesized
192-604: A particular language, with a part of its vocabulary replaced by words unknown to the larger public; argot used in this sense is synonymous with cant . For example, argot in this sense is used for systems such as verlan and louchébem , which retain French syntax and apply transformations only to individual words (and often only to a certain subset of words, such as nouns, or semantic content words). Such systems are examples of argots à clef , or "coded argots". Specific words can go from argot into everyday speech or
216-564: A road or track Cant (shooting) , referring to a gun being tilted around the longitudinal axis, rather than being horizontally levelled Cant (surname) , a family name and persons with it Canting , a tool used in making batik Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear musician) , an American performer University of Canterbury , a New Zealand university which uses Cantuar or Cant as an abbreviation for their name in post-nominal letters See also [ edit ] CANT (disambiguation) All pages with titles containing Cant Canté ,
240-488: A word of phrase is the property of having multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses. Often the senses of a word are related to each other within a semantic field . A common pattern is that one sense is broader and another narrower. This is often the case in technical jargon , where the target audience uses a narrower sense of a word that a general audience would tend to take in its broader sense. For example, in casual use " orthography " will often be glossed for
264-592: Is implicit within a context. Common examples are as follows: Usage labels of " sensu " plus a qualifier , such as " sensu stricto " ("in the strict sense") or " sensu lato " ("in the broad sense") are sometimes used to clarify what is meant by a text. Polysemy entails a common historic root to a word or phrase. Broad medical terms usually followed by qualifiers , such as those in relation to certain conditions or types of anatomical locations are polysemic, and older conceptual words are with few exceptions highly polysemic (and usually beyond shades of similar meaning into
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#1732852015588288-400: Is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, occupation, or hobby, in which sense it overlaps with jargon . In his 1862 novel Les Misérables , Victor Hugo refers to that argot as both "the language of the dark" and "the language of misery". The earliest known record of the term argot in this context was in a 1628 document. The word
312-415: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Cant (language) There are two main schools of thought on the origin of the word cant : An argot ( English: / ˈ ɑːr ɡ oʊ / ; from French argot [aʁɡo] ' slang ') is a language used by various groups to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot
336-560: Is often referred to as an argot, but it has been argued that it is an anti-language because of the social structure it maintains through the social class of the droogs. In parts of Connacht , in Ireland, cant mainly refers to an auction , typically on fair day ("Cantmen and Cantwomen, some from as far away as Dublin, would converge on Mohill on a Fair Day, ... set up their stalls ... and immediately start auctioning off their merchandise") and secondly means talk ("very entertaining conversation
360-405: The grypsera of Polish prisons, thieves' cant , Polari , and Bangime . Anti-languages are sometimes created by authors and used by characters in novels. These anti-languages do not have complete lexicons, cannot be observed in use for linguistic description , and therefore cannot be studied in the same way a language spoken by an existing anti-society would. However, they are still used in
384-569: The anti-language was first defined and studied by the linguist Michael Halliday , who used the term to describe the lingua franca of an anti-society . An anti-society is a small, separate community intentionally created within a larger society as an alternative to or resistance of it. For example, Adam Podgórecki studied one anti-society composed of Polish prisoners; Bhaktiprasad Mallik of Sanskrit College studied another composed of criminals in Calcutta. These societies develop anti-languages as
408-401: The known or probable purpose and register of the conversation or document, and the orientation (time and place) implied or expressed. The disambiguation is thus context-sensitive . Advanced semantic analysis has resulted in a sub-distinction. A word sense corresponds either neatly to a seme (the smallest possible unit of meaning ) or a sememe (larger unit of meaning), and polysemy of
432-418: The literature reflected vernacular use in the criminal underworld. A thief in 1839 claimed that the cant he had seen in print was nothing like the cant then used by gypsies, thieves, and beggars. He also said that each of these used distinct vocabularies, which overlapped, the gypsies having a cant word for everything, and the beggars using a lower style than the thieves. Word sense In linguistics ,
456-730: The other way. For example, modern French loufoque 'crazy', 'goofy', now common usage, originated in the louchébem transformation of Fr. fou 'crazy'. In the field of medicine, physicians have been said to have their own spoken argot, cant, or slang, which incorporates commonly understood abbreviations and acronyms, frequently used technical colloquialisms , and much everyday professional slang (that may or may not be institutionally or geographically localized). While many of these colloquialisms may prove impenetrable to most lay people, few seem to be specifically designed to conceal meaning from patients (perhaps because standard medical terminology would usually suffice anyway). The concept of
480-427: The park. In each sentence different collocates of "play" signal its different meanings. People and computers , as they read words, must use a process called word-sense disambiguation to reconstruct the likely intended meaning of a word. This process uses context to narrow the possible senses down to the probable ones. The context includes such things as the ideas conveyed by adjacent words and nearby phrases,
504-491: The research of Thomas Harman, Adam Podgórecki , and Bhaktiprasad Mallik to explore anti-languages and the connection between verbal communication and the maintenance of a social structure. For this reason, the study of anti-languages is both a study of sociology and linguistics. Halliday's findings can be compiled as a list of nine criteria that a language must meet to be considered an anti-language: Examples of anti-languages include Cockney rhyming slang , CB slang , verlan ,
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#1732852015588528-459: The study of anti-languages. Roger Fowler's "Anti-Languages in Fiction" analyzes Anthony Burgess 's A Clockwork Orange and William S. Burroughs ' Naked Lunch to redefine the nature of the anti-language and to describe its ideological purpose. A Clockwork Orange is a popular example of a novel where the main character is a teenage boy who speaks an anti-language called Nadsat . This language
552-529: Was often described as 'great cant'" or "crosstalk"). In Scotland, two unrelated creole languages are termed cant . Scottish Cant (a mixed language, primarily Scots and Romani with Scottish Gaelic influences) is spoken by lowland Roma groups. Highland Traveller's Cant (or Beurla Reagaird ) is a Gaelic -based cant of the Indigenous Highland Traveller population. The cants are mutually unintelligible. The word has also been used as
576-402: Was probably derived from the contemporary name les argotiers , given to a group of thieves at that time. Under the strictest definition, an argot is a proper language with its own grammatical system. Such complete secret languages are rare because the speakers usually have some public language in common, on which the argot is largely based. Such argots are lexically divergent forms of
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