I thought I’d check out Deadloch, an Aussie cop show that was reputed to be a well-done comic riff on deadly serious shows like Broadchurch (which my wife and I enjoyed a few years back), and sure enough it seems very enjoyable. But it uses some vocabulary I wasn’t familiar with; in the first few minutes someone mentions “all the nangs” in the vicinity of the crime scene, so of course I had to investigate. Wiktionary has it: nang (plural nangs) (Australia, New Zealand, slang) ‘A metal bulb filled with nitrous oxide gas, inhaled for its disassociative effects, normally intended as a propellant for whipped cream’ (Synonym: whippet). It seems to be quite new, since the OED doesn’t have it; there’s another nang, an adjective, which Wiktionary defines as (UK, slang, chiefly MLE) ‘excellent; awesome; masterful; deeply satisfying’ (“That was well nang!”) and says comes from “Jamaican Creole nyanga, potentially from West African languages, such as Mende (Sierra Leone) nyanga (‘ostentation; showing off’) or Hausa yanga (‘boastfulness’).” That one is in the OED (first published 2017):
British slang (chiefly London).
As a general term of approval: good, excellent, cool.
2002 Sometimes we use nang to mean good.
news.bbc.co.uk 18 January (Internet Archive Wayback Machine 21 Jan. 2002)2002 That’s nang dude.
abctales.com 6 March (forum post, accessed 3 May 2017)2004 The performance of ‘Rock Star’ with appearances by the Black Eyed Peas, Justin Timberlake, and E3’s finest Dizzee Rascal were nang.
Touch April 19/22016 I’m talking about a kid coming along and he’s nang. He was a very good yute.
‘Wiley’ in H. Collins, This is Grime 101
[…]
The etymology is simply “Origin unknown.” Which isn’t very nang.
So nang and naff are antonyms, more or less? Neato!
Hausa yanga “showing off” is real, but Hausa doesn’t strike me as a particularly likely source of London slang* or of a Jamaican creole word. And the y > n is difficult.
Mooré nánga “scorpion” has cognates not only all over Oti-Volta but all over “Gur”; sadly, I can concoct no way of making the etymon at all plausible as a source. Depends on how you feel about scorpions …
* Could be wrong: there are apparently enough Hausaphone schoolchildren in London that it’s worth recruiting Hausa-speaking teachers.
Wikipedia offers “whippet, nos or nang” as “colloquial” synonyms for what it more formally calls a “whipped cream charger.” I can’t claim previous familiarity with either nos or nang. I see wiktionary gives a sense of “nos” as either “Acronym of nitrous oxide system” or “Abbreviation of nitrous oxide.” It’s been some decades since whippets were (at least to my knowledge) a thing in circles I moved in, so I may not be au courant with the lingo, but the other two may even today not be AmEng.
Separately, I wondered about the antiquity of AmEng “whippet” and it looks like it was being used (capitalized) as a trademark for sale to those with legitimate need for cream-foaming technology no later than the 1940’s. There’s a 1978 Esquire article suggesting that both the item and that as a generic name for it had definitely made the transition to deprecated recreational use by then. I was certainly aware of that sense of the word no later than 1980, when Devo’s homophonously-titled number “Whip It” experienced chart success. (That’s not the double entendre most assumed the song was trying to evoke, but the homophony with the nitrous sense was I believe nonetheless remarked on at the time by tenth graders of my acquaintance.)
Green has nang adj. ‘first-rate, excellent’ derived from nyanga n. (also nang, nyang, yanga) ‘(West Indies) ostentation, esp. in one’s dress; a smart person; thus as adj., stylish.’, with citations as far back as 1902.
That looks very plausible. I think the question is really where Jamaican creole got it from (very unlikely to be Hausa.)
Perfectly possible that it didn’t come from any African language at all; but the Mende nyanga looks like a possible lead, at any rate.
But Akan or Gbe would probably be the best bets.
Kofi Yakpo’s Pichi grammar has (n)yangá “put on airs; coquet” and cites also Krio nyangá “be ostentatious.” Unfortunately he doesn’t hazard any guesses about its further origins, but he does specifically say that several other etyma shared by Pichi and Krio are from Mende.
Not sure that means a lot, though, given that he basically reckons that Pichi is mostly a Krio offshoot, and Krio has had plenty of opportunities to borrow from Mende since its (presumed) anabasis from the West Indies.
Still, this is evidently an echt pan-English-lexifier-Atlantic-creole word, and not just a Jamaicaism of some sort.
I don’t have any lexical materials for Mende, alas.
The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang by Tony Thorne (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), doubtless a thoroughly unreliable source, says (p. 302): “No one is quite sure of the origin of nang, which was first heard in East London at the turn of this century: it may be from a Bengali word for a naked woman, or from Nang Phan, the name of a Hackney school-girl.”
Yes. I think we can file that with … all the others.
Green gets my vote.
Hausa yanga seems to apply to women particularly, with an overtone of conduct unbecoming to a properly brung up Hausa young lady (which would probably commend it to the Youth of Today.) But I very much doubt whether Hausa has any more to do with it than nude Bengalis or this imaginary schoolgirl from Hackney. (Limerick?)
Can’t find anything remotely plausible in Akan. Don’t know any Gbe to speak of. But Mende looks like the top contender for the Ultimate Origin after all. It would be nice to have some other confirmation that Mende nyanga actually exists, though (and isn’t borrowed from Krio …)
Thorne’s source for the “Hackney school-girl” theory is presumably the August 11, 2003 contribution to urbandictionary.com by someone posting as “Nang’s Best Friend.” That adds the detail that Miss Phan (if that’s the surname) was specifically an alumna of “Kingsland Secondary School (now sadly gone).” Wikipedia says that that was a real school which was indeed in Hackney and was indeed shut down in 2003 at the behest of the “Office of The Schools Adjudicator,” which sounds like a rather frightening bureaucracy.
That sounds like the classic Urban Dictionary trope of using inside jokes and references to friends in fake definitions. Damn kids.
While I apologise to Miss Nang Phan for doubting her existence (unless she is, in fact, non-existent, in which case I don’t care about her at all*), even if she is real, this screams “folk etymology.”
“Peng” is another Londonese term of approbation for one’s person, one that I was actually aware of despite my own extremely low level of hip-and-happeningness. I’ve no idea where that comes from, either.
* Rank existentialism, on reflection. I repent. Nonexistent people are people too.
The difference between folk etymology and inside jokes may indeed be a subtle one. There’s apparently a Nang Phan currently working in the real estate business in Toronto but I can’t immediately tell if she was a Hackney schoolgirl 23+ years ago.
It’s a Vietnamese name and I don’t think of the UK as a major location in the Vietnamese diaspora, but the UK population is apparently not zero even if it’s <10% of the population in France. Wikipedia says most UK-resident ethnic Vietnamese are in the London area, with especial concentrations in Lewisham, Southwark and … Hackney.
I know no Bengali, but as far as I can make out, নাঙ্গা naṅga just means “naked”*; I think the “woman” is a figment of the active imagination of the etymologist. Such unbridled fancy, if unchecked, seems all too likely to lead to depravities like “proto-World.”
It does remind me of Londonese “bare” (= “very”), but I can’t devise any cunning theory from that.
* An actual cognate, in fact:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%97%E0%A6%BE#Bengali
I see that Bengali has also borrowed the Sanskrit word, presumably for more elevated kinds of nudity.
Does Bengali not do that thing where a bare (as it were) adjective can be used substantively to mean “ADJ person” or “ADJ thing” as context may suggest? In English “nude” as a noun generally means “painting/photo depicting a naked person” rather than “naked person” as such, but it certainly would have to work that way in Bengali.
Alas, I know not.
(Kusaal doesn’t, except with adjectives that were secretly human-reference nouns, and were only pretending to be adjectives in the first place, like gik “mute.”)
It occurs to me that “swaggering(ly)” is very much the kind of concept that many West African languages (including the creoles) often express by ideophones, as in e.g. Kusaal
Asumbul zɔtnɛ tɔlib tɔlib.
“Bre’r Rabbit is running lickety-split.”
(There are better examples of what I mean; this is just one that came readily to mind. Perhaps “hoity-toity” in English …)
(N)yanga does have a rather ideophoney look to it. And without being able to look it up in a dictionary of Mende (or whatever) which gives examples in context, it’s impossible to tell what part of speech it originally was. Ideophones do get promoted to nouns sometimes (for good behaviour.)
If it is (or started out as) an ideophone, tracking down its ultimate origin may be particularly difficult. Ideophones do get borrowed between languages though, sometimes surprisingly widely, so it wouldn’t necessarily be a hiding to nothing. But ideophones are often poorly documented in grammars and left out of dictionaries altogether.
Jonathan Green’s take on nang, adj., was featured at Language Hat in 2014: “there are real novelties” in “slang’s current cutting edge, Multi-ethnic London English (MLE)”, he said.
Wiktionary at nyanga (Jamaican Creole) cites Alsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, and Cassidy and Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English, which both suggest Mende (and not Hausa) as a source. Green has Cassidy and Le Page in his bibliography, so he probably got the etymology from there.
(The internet thinks I need to know that nang, pronounced /nɑŋ/, is a roasted flatbread from Xinjiang, and that Nang is a magazine about Asian cinema, named for หนัง, Thai for shadow puppetry as well as cinema or movie. No, internet, you’re not helping!)
Jonathan Green’s take on nang, adj., was featured at Language Hat in 2014
Sigh. At least there’s been a decent interval.
This interesting thesis
https://www.academia.edu/26189115/Out_of_Africa_African_influences_in_Atlantic_Creoles
cites some evidence that ideophones in the Atlantic creoles were more often created locally than inherited from substrates.
I wonder if Mende really might have nicked nyanga from Krio? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence for specifically Mende influence on the protolanguage underlying the West African English-lexifier creoles before the return to Africa: much more “Kwa.”
The “problems” bit of the thesis is interesting. There seems, for example, to be little demographic evidence for a big Akan-speaking contingent of actual people among the enslaved, despite the Akan lexical influence on, especially, Jamaican creole; and the usual (and extremely natural) attribution of the second-person plural pronoun unu to Igbo doesn’t go well with the absence of evidence that any significant number of the enslaved were actually Igbo. (I’ve always thought that was odd.)
There are still those who maintain that the West African E-L creoles developed in situ, I gather …
Clearly, More Research is Needed.
Innes’s 1969 Mende dictionary has “nyanga ʟʜ n. (esp. of women) ostentation, style, giving oneself airs”. It is not in Schön’s 1884 vocabulary. Either it just didn’t get recorded in that older dictionary, or the word is a recent loan (from Hausa?) and therefore Mende is not the direct source for the Jamaican word.
(I found a Mende/English/Tok Pisin dictionary too, but to my relief that is of a Sepik language of that name.)
Nang in the sense “metal bulb used for dissociative effect” isn’t so recent in NZ. I first heard it in the early 2000s and didn’t learn their culinary use until some time later. They’re pretty topical in the news (possibly due to the rarity of occurrences in general here).
I’d say that Hausa is an extremely unlikely source of loanwords in Mende.
I notice that the Mende tones match the Krio (which cuts either way) … and, indeed, the Hausa. The final vowel is long in Hausa, but then, Hausa is like that. Never use one mora when you could be using two.
Hausa is a magpie language; it’s not inconceivable that Hausa has itself borrowed this word from some southern neighbour. I found a list of African words in Nigerian Pidgin which actually attributed Pidgin nyanga to an Igbo iyanga, but I haven’t found any other trace of such a word, and such lists are often wrong.
The Hausa word is in Bargery, so it’s no recent adoption, but then the creole word has evidently been around longer than that.
But Wiktionary has quotations from 1996 and 1998, and the entry itself has been there since 2006 (where has the time gone??). Trad lexicography isn’t going to be very good at keeping up with drug slang. Even Green has only one citation, from 2023, so Wiktionary is way ahead on this one.
Google Books found “Nang – Nitrous Oxide” in a so-called Complete Drug Slang Dictionary from 2004, which is just a wordlist — no regional labels, no dates, no quotations, no sources — but let’s not be hard on the author, he was in high school!
Schön (1884) does have nyānga under pride in the English–Mende section, p. 221 here.
I have seen “silver bullet” used for the whippet/nang in Irish public discourse . Dunno if this is a genuine street name or a media invention.
Somewhat related. The OED Word of Day today is futz.
Some early cites from the Sydney Sportsman and another Australian publication, Truth, follow. (I was not expecting this word to show up in Australia first. (The Sydney Sportsman sounds like a colorful publication, and the same publisher also published Truth, according to that Wikipedia entry. I wonder if that might have something to do with the pattern of attestation.) The OED etymology:
I do not wish to argue explicitly for a Yiddish origin of futz (or open the can of worms of the similar sounding putz, noun and verb). But I was wondering, can’t Australian English simply have its own parallel Yiddishisms with a path of transmission partially or wholly separate and independent from those of American English? Note the patterns of attestation in Greene entries for shickered and ryebuck (possibly < Yiddish רװח revekh, ריװח reyvekh ‘profit’ < Hebrew רֶוַח réwaḥ ‘extension, wide space, room; ease, relief; profit, gain’; cf. Rotwelsch Rebbach, Rewach, etc., German Reibach ‘(high) profits, a pile (of money)’; cf. also Bargoens rewochem, rewogem ‘profit’, ultimately < Hebrew pl. רְוָחִים rəwāḥîm).
David E.: I know no Bengali, but as far as I can make out, নাঙ্গা naṅga just means “naked”*; I think the “woman” is a figment of the active imagination of the etymologist. Such unbridled fancy, if unchecked, seems all too likely to lead to depravities like “proto-World.”
* An actual cognate, in fact:
ktschwarz: (The internet thinks I need to know that nang, pronounced /nɑŋ/, is a roasted flatbread from Xinjiang […])
If I’m not misremembering, the IE word for “naked” is (through Persian?) also the source of na(a)n “Indian flat bread”. It wouldn’t be odd to find it as a Silk Road wanderwort in Xinjiang – or beyond.
Not that this has anything to do with the main question.
As all too often, it struck me lately that even outside and on my phone, I could at least check Wiktionary.
Persian seems right, but the further etymology is apparently not as simple as I thought.
Absolutely fascinating! The OED (entry revised 2003) just says “< Urdu nān bread, loaf < Persian nān in the same senses.”
Re Xerîb’s suggestion of Yiddishisms in AustEng originating there rather than being imported, it seems like there’s no a priori reason it couldn’t happen, although with the two other Green’s entries he mentioned it looks like maybe there was a earlier borrowing from Yiddish in BrEng that was then imported (quite possibly by Gentile speakers) to Australia although it then thrived there while becoming obsolete in England?
From a timeline perspective, however, I have a maybe-unreliable sense that most Yiddishisms that entered “mainstream” AmEng did so meaningfully later than the 1907 date of the Sydney Sportsman cite. As of that era, the Jewish population (not all Yiddish-speakers, of course) of Australia was both dramatically smaller than that of the US (same caveat) in absolute numbers and also significantly smaller in percentage terms, but obviously not so small as to be incapable of linguistic impact.
Me: It wouldn’t be odd to find [naan] as a Silk Road wanderwort in Xinjiang – or beyond.
We find Mandarin 饢 (náng), a borrowing from Uyghur, and the compund 饢坑 (nángkēng) “tandoor oven”. The same glyph is used for nǎng v. “stuff one’s mouth”, which I don’t know if is a Chinese verbing or an unrelated near-homonym.
The word has apparently spread further, to Southeast China (Cantonese and Wu) and to Japan. But I can’t vouch for that. We’re reaching the limits of Wiktionary’s capacities, and the Mandarin word seems restricted to an Uyghur context.
Manfred Klarberg, “Yiddish in Melbourne” (The Jewish Journal of Sociology, June 1970) has interesting material on post-WW2 politics but nothing on pre-WW1 linguistics.
nān was also loaned into the Turkic languages of Central Asia. There it has become the ordinary word for bread and is also used for European style loaves. If you want to specify “flatbread”, you say tandyr nan in Kazakh. The Uzbek equivalent is non. As Uzbekistan kept following the Soviet habit of writing on lorries and trucks the name of the goods carried (“bread”, “milk”, “water”, “people”) even after switching to the Roman alphabet in the 90s, one would frequently see lorries with NON written on them, as if there was a protest event ongoing staged by an influx of French.
There once wasn’t a schoolgirl from Hackney?
I’ve seen it proposed as a loanword from the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex into Proto-Indo-Iranian. That would certainly take care of the semantics… It must in any case have been all over Iranian very early: > Udmurt /nʲanʲ/ “bread”, /pelʲnʲanʲ/ literally “ear bread” > пельмени.
My impression is the Cantonese & Wu pronunciations are just the expected readings of the character, i.e. automatic etymological nativization of a word that may not occur in reality; it’s in the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, but that’s a Chinese-Japanese dictionary as its name says, not limited to characters that have been used in Japanese specifically. The absence in the Kangxi dictionary seems more likely to be meaningful.
TEMPS DE GRÈVE
TANT DE RÊVES
can’t Australian English simply have its own parallel Yiddishisms with a path of transmission partially or wholly separate and independent from those of American English?
i would assume it does! and i’d expect some to overlap and others not, with a possibility of transmission in either direction as well as parallel development. i don’t know enough about the history of the melbourne community to have an opinion about the plausibility of the timeline.
a reasonably comprehensive comparison of yiddishisms/yiddish-derived words in different englishes would be an amazing thing to have, and could show to what extent differences cluster according to patterns of regional chain migration (south african yiddish-speakers being overwhelmingly litvaks, for instance), or/and by other things (r-full/r-less versions, etc).
i don’t find “arumfartsn” (or any meaning for “fartsn” besides “fart”) in refoyl’s dictionary, harkavy*, or the Comprehensive. and that makes me more skeptical than a weird transmission route.
.
* who files words in אַרומ־ | arum- under הערומ־ | herum- which i’ve never noticed before!
Are there established local yiddishisms in Montréal English or Montréal French?
i’m sure there are in montréal jewish english, but beyond that i don’t have a real sense*, because the people i know best in montréal are almost all from elsewhere (germany, iran, the u.s., etc).
.
* besides a guess that it’s more likely on the anglo side of the line, because historically yiddish-speaking jews there went through the anglo/protestant school system rather than the franco/catholic one.
The Jewish population of Montreal has shifted fairly significantly over the last half-century or so, with a quite substantial outmigration of Anglophones with Yiddish-speaking ancestors to Toronto and elsewhere partially replaced by newer Francophone arrivals whose ancestors had often not spoken Yiddish but might have spoken Ladino and some Arabic.
Obviously if a particular Yiddishism had been fully taken on board in the speech of the local Gentile Anglophones, outmigration of its original source wouldn’t necessarily make the borrowing vanish, although other Anglophone outmigration was of course happening at the same time.
On creoles* in general, academia.edu kindly, and (for once) correctly, thought that I might be interested in this highly engagé, yet well-evidenced and splendid rant by Michel DeGraff:
https://www.academia.edu/6751844/Morphology_in_Creole_Genesis_Linguistics_and_Ideology
[If I’d read it before, I’d forgotten. I naturally cheered at the McWhorter-bashing, and also liked the disapprobation levelled at Claire Lefebvre, joint author of the worst EVAH entry in the generally admirable Mouton Grammar Library series. (Ignore the MIT UG nonsense. Nobody’s perfect.)]
* Not Yiddish, which isn’t. I’m reverting to a previous topic, Because Hattery.
@J.W. Brewer
Nos is a staple as a boost in racing videogames and in movies like The Fast & The Furious.
For example here’s an extract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsXBMdKboLA
The page with the rant tells me to log in to read it. Above that notice, the rant fades to grey. Under it, it is shown to me in full, but (as above) with all whitespace removed and some letters smushed together. Too hard to read for now.
Try here instead, and download the pdf.
Done, thank you!