Tamlin Magee (last seen here in 2024) has a piece in BBC Future about the Russian cant language called fenya:
When would you hide in a raspberry? Why don’t you want to be a sixer? And what does it mean to go to the akademiya? Russian often takes slang to complex levels, such as through Mat, its linguistic system for obscenities. But even a “matershchinnik” (a well-practiced master of swearing) might find the above phrases nonsensical – unless, of course, they are familiar with Fenya, the language of Russia’s colossal prison system.
This language of criminals has been deployed by underworld figures for centuries to puzzle and evade. But during the 20th Century, its curious mixture of double entendre and loan words ballooned in Soviet prisons.
With German, Greek and Yiddish influences, Fenya is brimming with confusing hidden meanings. In Russian, “babki” literally means “grandmas”, but in Fenya, it also means “money”. “Varezhka” means a “mitten” but also a “mouth, while “khalyava”, derived from the Hebrew for “milk”, is a “freebie” or “giveaway”.
A single word in Fenya can contain hidden codes known only to speakers of the slang. And just as it once bewildered prison camp guards, its language tricks are now being being used online, obscuring the intent of cyber-criminals and confusing authorities.
There’s much that’s familiar to any Russophone — everybody knows мусор [musor] ‘trash’ refers to cops — but it’s a useful rundown of the history involved:
Fenya’s origins are shrouded in mystery. One intriguing (though disputed) theory suggests it began with nomadic salesmen called Ofeni who travelled on foot across Russia selling religious knick-knacks. A 17th-Century church schism, the theory goes, declared their wares items heretical, so wayfaring merchants adopted their own unique modes of speech.
More is known about how Fenya spread. The vocabulary is thought to have started expanding in the 19th Century, writes Mark Galeotti, an expert in modern Russia, intelligence consultant and honorary professor at University College London, in his 2018 book The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia. It was then, he says, that street urchins and criminals started to place “fe” and “nye” sounds in the middle of words.
These particular tics, redolent of an underworld pig-Latin, were eventually dropped, writes Galeotti. But not before gangs of pickpockets and street scammers adopted Fenya. Initiations into their crews counted on a basic understanding of it. Words and phrases were documented at length in an 1863 dictionary of living Russian, which attempted to categorise Russian as it was lived and spoken.
In Fenya, hierarchies are expressed through card-game jargon, with suits and clubs symbolising bona fide thieves. Animals take on secret double-lives as objects, so speakers know that a monkey is a mirror and a fox is a folding-knife. Altogether, Fenya’s vocabulary is thought to comprise between 10,000 and 27,000 words.
Among the intelligentsia of the late Tsarist period, the tantalising suggestion of a shadow criminal society fascinated literary figures and inspired so-called vagabond music – where performers sang in Fenya and romanticised slum life. But it was the enormous social upheaval of wars and revolution to come that really cemented Fenya’s rise.
He goes on to discuss how it spread via the Gulag system, where “all sorts of people would mix with petty criminals – giving everyone from peasants to the intelligentsia a first-hand taste of Fenya,” and continues:
The days following Stalin’s death in 1953 brought another twist to the tale of Fenya. A mass amnesty of more than a million prisoners meant petty criminals left the Gulags in droves. They returned home, bringing Fenya with them. “Blatnaya pesnya” – thieves’ songs – broke out in taverns across the country.
“[At this time] there was a sense that criminal culture was a folk culture, suppressed by the official party,” says Svetlana Stephenson, professor of sociology at London Metropolitan University and author of Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power. “There was a flirtation with this world among the intelligentsia.”
There’s lots of good stuff, including bootlegged music on X-ray sheets (discussed in this thread) and the “deliberate misspellings and punny inventions” that “evolved into new slang known as padonki, also ironically named olbanian” (explained by dimrub in this 2005 comment), as well as sidebars on topics like secret languages in other communities around the world (“The Kali-worshipping Thuggees of India talked in Ramaseeana from the 1700s”); if any of this interests you, by all means click on through. And for lagniappe, I offer Viv Groskop’s enjoyably splenetic The hill I will die on: Faux Cyrillic is a load of old crдp (“To the designers of film posters, I suppose it looks cleverly exotic – but there are 250 million readers of Cyrillic globally, and its misuse grinds our gears”). Both links were sent by my old pal Nick Jainschigg; thanks, Nick!
Groskop’s rant is very nice! But even she, as far as I can tell, slipped: “Fдцx Cчrillic” doesn’t read “Fdtsx Schrillic” but “Fdtskh Schrillis”, if one maximizes the Cyrillic interpretations.
P.S. What kind of name is Jainschigg?
No longer by the time young Sergey Dovlatov was a camp guard:
Y: please refrain from that. I almost had epileptic episode from reading faux Cyrillic once. I’m not joking. We removed a lot of the wikipedia page about it when a lot of people complained also. I have stress-related epilepsy and it’s not a trivial matter.
Sorry, V. That sounds terrible.
Y : it’s fine! You didn’t know.
In my experience, an stress-influenced episode goes like this. You’re walking around and reading on your phone. Then the sentences seem to get a bit LLM-ish, and not what you’re actually reading. Then you know you have to get to a safe space. But the problem is your potential interlocutors just see someone who is unable to form sentences other than “I need to sit somewhere”, if that.
You don’t have the time (maybe half a minute, maybe two minutes) to tell them that “my language function is deteriorating, could you please let me sit for five minutes somewhere”. What _is_ actually happening is that all of neurons a firing at the same time. So you just sit somewhere where it seems safe.
“all of you neurons a firing at the same time” is not a metaphor — that’s literally what is happening. Literally literally. Yay for reduplication disambiguating ambiguity.
The Russian genre of “urban romance” helped extend the life of Fenya in exactly the same way as Argentine tango, filling some of the very similar social niches and needs, perpetuated century-old Lunfardo. The real slang evolved furiously fast, in the meantime, with many old songs words falling into disuse.
What kind of name is Jainschigg?
German — specifically Austrian, I think. DM will know.
Ah, Jainschigg is a Slovenian name, as distinguished by the “-igg” ending. Unfortunately, the only well-known name that has that ending is Kurt Schuschnigg. Apparently, that ending is the local equivalent of “-itz” or “-icz”. Dad was from Ljubljana, or perhaps Laibach, since that’s what it was when his parents emigrated to Ohio. He always considered himself Austro-Hungarian, FWIW, rather than Yugoslavian or Slovenian. Overall, though, the name Jainschigg is a very localized version of “Johnson”. Very, very localized. There’s one Nick Jainschigg who teaches at RISD (me), and another in Vienna who I’ve never met but have emailed with since people occasionally get confused. He only has one “g” though.
Looks to me like Janišek. Seems they’re related.
Jaindl: Hörbranz, Innsbruck
…
Janauschek: Innsbruck
…
Janecek: Kitzbühel
…
Janes: Dornbirn, Kirchbichl, Kundl, Stans, Wörgl
Janesch: Innsbruck
…
Janetschek: Innsbruck, Kufstein
…
Janisch: Feldkirch, Innsbruck, Kirchbichl, Reith (Kufstein), Ried i.T.
Janitschek: Bregenz
https://www.tirol.gv.at/kunst-kultur/landesarchiv/forschungstipps/familiennamen/familiennamen-j/
From this, I would say Stu is correct and there is variation in vowels and between sch and tsch (also Vg(g) and Vk can be seen in other name endings; the Slovene name Pogačnik can be spelled Pogatschnik, Pogatschnig and Pogatschnigg).
I could not find a similar alphabetic list for Carinthia.
Janáček: Hukvaldy,(in Czechia these days)
Ah, Jainschigg is a Slovenian name
Thanks, Nick! (I apologize to all and sundry for his explanatory comment being held up in moderation all night. Akismet hates Slovenian names.)
Now my later comment is superfluous. Please delete it !
No, you were right, it is an equivalent of Janišek!
I’d have said “Carinthian”: something Slovene, with -ik reinterpreted either as the German adjective suffix -ig or spelled with gg to make clear it doesn’t have an affricate. I couldn’t have guessed the original, though; such names have often gone through other reinterpretations or even centuries-old sound shifts.
Trieste/Trst and Friuli also feature similar versions of Slovenian names. I always thought Suppancig (Zupančič) was via Friulian but perhaps it was a German language
https://share.google/qA03VKzb3Q5BFMbzX
The Slovenian Nazi Odilo Globočnik (“the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known” according to his Wikipedia page) sometimes had his name Germanized to Globotschnigg.
To be fair, the “vilest individual in the vilest organization” characterization is said by wikipedia to be the characterization of a named individual (apparently one not notable enough to have his own wikipedia page), so it’s not a deviation from the “neutral point of view” desideratum. You would think that there would be other worthy candidates with substantial support for their own claims to be even viler.
Isn’t a native German speaker going to think something sounds a bit non-Teutonic about “Globot-” even if the “-schnigg” ending doesn’t signal that to them?
What the Wikipedia page actually says is “Historian Michael Allen described him as ‘the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known,'” citing the quote to Gregor Joseph Kranjc, To Walk with the Devil: Slovene Collaboration and Axis Occupation, 1941-1945, p. 124; I’m not sure why it’s not cited to the original source, Allen’s book The Business of Genocide.
Incidentally, that last Wikipedia link is a bizarre stub; it reads in its totality:
There follow ten detailed references. Why?
If Kranj was motivated to write his book by a feeling that Slovene collaboration deserved more prominence in WW2-related discourse than it traditionally had received, he must have found Allen’s quote useful to seize on. It is alas generally the fate of the Slovenes to be ignored rather than be touted as the heroes, the villains, or even the victims in any particular historical situation.
Sure, I’m just wondering why the Wikieditor didn’t cite the quote to the original source. Lazy, I call it.