http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/04/24/lol-kitteh-as-a-second-language-lksl-101-in-five-easy-steps/
That’s a really cute cat. And look, he has a bow on his head!”
Step two: “Engrish” it.
1) Mis-decline verbs, especially misuse the verb “to be”
2) Misuse gerunds
3) Overuse prepositional phrases
4) Blatant rearrangement of syntax
5) Incorrect plurals and past-tense verbs
6) “noun” your adjectives. (For instance, the adjective “blue” can become the noun “blueness”)
7) Improper pronouns
8 ) Drop the articles (”a”, “and”, “the”) in favor of adding “-age” to the end of a noun
9) Use “younger” words (”kitty” versus “cat”, “fuzzy” versus “furry”, etc.)
10) Use the word “with” inappropriately.
11) If you really can’t wrap your head around the concepts behind “Engrish”, try this: Go to babelfish.altavista.com, type your desired comment in, hit “english-to-Japanese”, then re-translate back to English. You have to be able to view special characters (the kanji). If you can’t get that to work, try translating to a different, european-text language, like German.
So, we get:
“That being the kitty very full of cuteness. And to be with looking! Him gots bowage on hims head!”
Step three: Misspell everything. There’s no wrong way to do this, just try not to accidentally correctly spell a completely different word (especially one that’s pronounced differently than your spelling intends). Some words (usually short words) should simply remain spelled correctly for continuity’s sake.
1) Think like a little kid / cat / dog / goldfish, and get hukd on foniks
2) I cannot stress this enough: Vowels are your friends! Do not neglect vowels!! We’re speaking LolKitteh here, not text messaging! (My advice: use alternate vowels, Y’s are particularly handy, but don’t overuse them.)
3) Extra W’s and H’s (”awl” instead of “all”)
4) Z’s instead of S’s are easy
5) Double-letters versus single letters are always fun
6) Don’t be afraid to further pluralize things, including your verbs
7) Remember that the word “THE” must always be spelled “TEH”
now, we have:
“Dat beesing teh kiti vary ful ov kutenis. An to bees lukingz! Hims gotz bowwagez on hims hed!!”
Step four: Add exclamations and extra words.
1) Use commonly accepted internet abbreviations. Misspell them if necessary. (LOL = lawlz! ROTFL = rofflz! OMG = omgwtfbbq!?! … etc … )
2) Imagine that you’re actually in a crowd of people and you want everyone to look at this particular picture. Extra exclamations are thus necessary.
3) Think Valley Girl. The words “like,” “totally,” etc can be added. Remember to misspell!
4) Some common statements have been severely abbreviated into one single multi-syllabic word. These are good to use. The best example is “Okay, thank you, good-bye!” Which has been shortened to “kthxbye” (or “kthxbai”)
And, we have:
“OMG wau!! Dat beesing a kiti vary ful ov tewtul kutenis!! Bees wif da lukingz! Omg him gotz da bowwagez on himz hed lyk WTF?!?”
Step five: Add additional information. This can be the desire to interact with the subject of the photo, personal information, empathetic or sympathetic statements, responses to other posts, etc. Again, nothing right or wrong here, just whatever comes to mind.
Finally:
“OMG wau!! Dat beesings a kiti vary ful ov tewtul kutenis!! Bees wif da lukingz!! Omg him gotz da bowwagez on himz hed lyk WTF?!? OMG I tewtul wuntz to grabz dat kiti and fuzziez himz awl ovar … him sooooooo mooshy an fullz ov win!! Don werry lil kiti, I no eetz u! I luvz kitiz! I can has bunchiz ov dem! Mah kitiz luvz bowwagez too! YETH!! GIMME!! Kthxbai!”
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D: LOL!
This reminded me of Esperanto.
I try to literally translate stuff in Espo first, then try to figure out the English euphemism.
Take this sentence.
Can I have a cheeseburger?
I pretty much end up with...
Can I haz cheeseburger. LOL! Cat.
Mine translates from 'la mia' to 'the my'.
Other pet peeves this week:
-false friends / cognates.
E.g. precipe means principally. Why not prencipe?
- oddly deformed new sounds in old familiar words.
College is collegio. G not J sound. Why?
- inexplicably wordy versions of words that could be pared down. Volapuk lite would have been nice.
E.g. historio for history. Why not truncate it to histor-o?
- awkward modular construction requiring 2 unrelated words. Isn't that an opaque multiple word lexeme, a criticism often directed at Ogden's Basic English?
Tie is there. C^i (chi) is closeness. Near is ... C^i tie.
- troubling homages to natural language expressions.
E.g. koro is heart. Kora is cordial. Literally - hearty.
- the various query words continue to kick my butt.
You might think that kie would be somehow related to kiel, or that kiel would at least be a different category with that L. Nope.
Kie is what place? Kiel is what way? I.e. where and how respectively.
I'm dying here.
- continuing reliance on diacritics for 'closed class' function words.
C^ar for because.
Tacking some accents on obscure words or imported words would not be a big deal. This is. I can only imagine what a nightmare this must have been back in the day of typesetting. I find trying to type at any speed with the Ek! diacritic program on to be vexing.
- for that matter, a few more accents *might* have been welcome.
E.g. lingvo means language. Let us say that a word such as lingo could exist.
But how can we clarify pronunciation? Would it be lin-go? Or ling -o??
A diacritic such as lin^o for NG would have sufficed.
Fewer phonemes would have addressed it. I'd say this would decrease brevity, but the his-to-ri-o construction of many words pretty much tosses brevity out the window anyway.
D: My roomie has agreed to learn Espo to practise with me. He will undoubtedly run circles around me, being a talented polyglot.
This still leaves me with the opinion that Espo is only easy for folks that are able to easily learn a NATURAL language. I.e. a language by a linguist, for linguists.
Not exactly the purported target audience...
This might explain the 1 in 1000 stat, coinciding roughly with natural language whizzes.
D: aside: the spell check does not work in Explorer.
Nice interface. No, reeeaaaalllllyyy.
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