Russian Influences
Russian influences play the biggest role in Nadsat. Most of those Russian influenced words are slightly anglicized loan-words often maintaining the original Russian pronunciation. One example is the Russian word Lyudi, which is anglicized to lewdies, meaning "people". Another Russian word is Bábushka which is anglicized to baboochka, meaning "grandmother", "old woman". Some of the anglicised words are truncated, for example "pony" from ponimát’, "to understand", or otherwise shortened, for example "veck" from čelovék, "person", "man" (though the anglicized word 'chelloveck' is also used in the book).
A further means of constructing Nadsat words is the employment of homophones. For example, one Nadsat term which may seem like an English composition, horrorshow, actually stems from the Russian word for "good"; khorosho, which sounds similar to horrorshow. In this same manner many of the Russian loanwords became an English–Russian hybrid, with Russian origins, but English spellings and pronunciations. A further example is the Russian word for "head", golová, which sounds similar to Gulliver known from "Gulliver’s travels". Consequently Gulliver becomes the Nadsat expression for the concept "head".
However, many of Burgess' loan-words, such as devochka ("girl") and droog ("friend") maintained both their relative spelling and meaning over the course of translation.
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