Turns out that Pig Latin wasn’t just a parental irritation — it may hold a key to human eech-spay and a Cambridge University linguistics researcher wants to apture-cay your mad Pig Latin skills for posterity.
Thomas Kettig, a researcher in the Linguistics department at Cambridge University (the same place that just invented hybrid airplanes, just saying) is asking for pairs of eople-pay to send in recordings of their onversations-cay in Pig Latin for his effort analyze the forgotten (by people over age 11) tongue. He writes, sadly not in Pig Latin:
The purpose this study is to examine the linguistic rules that govern Pig Latin and analyze how Pig Latin is produced by confident, experienced speakers. This can be useful for exploring the behavior of things like syllables, phonemes, and phonological features. In the process, this can help hone our understanding of how these mental building blocks fit together to create words.
Kettig is looking for pairs of people to speak Pig Latin for four minutes, which oesn’t-day ound-say ike-lay uch-may until you actually try it, but he offers helpful conversation prompts (Talk about pets! The superpower you wish you had! How did you meet?). He says not to et-fray if your prowess has dipped from its third-grade peak:
Don’t worry about occasional errors or difficulty with some words. As long as you feel that you can speak more or less competently and understand your conversation partner as you go, please give it a try!
Conversationalists can win an Amazon gift card raffle, but the real satisfaction is contributing selflessly to the furthering of human knowledge. Here’s more on the study also tumblr coming at ya. Just don’t blame us if you can’t op-stay.