Introduction
Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky can genuinely be attributed as one of the greatest works of English nonsense. The poem is simple and meaningless at first glance, but perfect in grammatical structure and deep on closer inspection. Carroll constructs his language and writes the poem Jabberglot, which semioticians are pondering today. Scientists are still unraveling the meaning of many words in the poem and coming up with an increasing number of translations.
Discussion
The Alice books are exclusively English books in the sense that many of the situations and characters in them are based on purely linguistic phenomena, and much would change if these books were written in another language. As a magician of language, Carroll raised in the poem and in the whole work about the girl Alice, the most ancient folklore layer: the abstruse language is in children’s counting rhymes, it was used with magic spells. Alice, like linguists, getting to the meaning of the words and speeches of the inhabitants of Wonderland, sees a scale, its logic, its measure of reality.
Having given the word to Jabberwocky, Carroll included the poem in a game situation in the text and – in passing – said a new word in linguistics. Indeed, it was from this episode of Alice Through the Looking-Glass that the well-known term words-bags, words-wallets came out. And it turns out that “slithy toves” is “a cross between a ferret, a lizard, and a corkscrew,” and “outgrabe” means “grunted and laughed” (Carroll). The author used all the possibilities of the language to create a new and, with it, a new reality, in which those who cannot or do not want to live in everyday life are saved.
In the central stanzas, there are also riddle words, and nonsense words, all of which are adjectives: “frumious, vorpal, manxome, uffish, tulgey, frabjous.” Researchers of Lewis Carroll’s work finally found out that they are formed with the help of suffixes existing in modern English from Anglo-Saxon stems (quote 27).
Conclusion
Thus, the poem Jabberwocky is one of the clearest examples of how flexible language structure can be, proof that eccentric words – nonsense can form meaning and carry information.
Works Cited
Adoniou, Misty. Spelling It out: How Words Work and How to Teach Them. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Carroll, Lewis. “Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.”Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 1983, Web.