At what point does a set of passwords, a secret code become a fully-fledged language? German born Harvard University English professor Martin Puchner became fascinated by a Central European argot called Rotwelsch intrigued by his countercultural uncle devoted to amateur scholarship on the subject and appalled upon learning that his amiable grandfather was a Nazi academic determined to extirpate Rotwelsch, which he derided as a mongrel tongue.
Puchner weaves family history, more skillfully than most authors who try to personalize academic inquiry, into his investigation of Rotwelsch. Apparently, Rotwelsch developed as a set of words and signs that enabled vagrants and criminals (not necessarly the same people) and a vaguely described subculture of non-Gypsy travelers to communicate with each other. Although Puchner insists on Rotwelsch’s polyglot origins, most of the vocabulary he cites is Yiddish or Yiddish derived. Does Rotwelsch have a distinct grammar? Readers are left to suspect that it’s German-Yiddish based, albeit no literature emerged from the tongue’s daily users and no 19th century Noah Webster set forth to codify it.
The Language of Thieves is fascinating, but its subject deserves to be part of a larger account of social subcurrents in Europe and elsewhere in the world or of the ways words from any language can be coded with hidden meanings.
