Learning Mandarin - Language from the Mars

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CITYLIFE / Odds & Ends






Language from the Mars


By He Jianwei (Beijing Today)
Updated: 2007-09-12 09:53







*Mock sounds

Marsspeakers use Arabic numerals and Latin letters to stand in for
characters with similar sounds, for example, using the digit "4" to stand
in for si, death, or shi, yes. They also combine in English netspeak such
as "u" in place of "you".

*Combining characters

Chinese characters are usually constructed from several elements, or
radicals. In Marsspeak, writers break up characters into several pieces,
so a character like qiang could be written as the characters gong and
sui. Readers reassemble the parts to figure out what character was
intending to say.

*Mistakenly-written

The exact opposite is done with these characters, where the intended
character is embedded within another. At first glance, it looks like
someone just made a careless typo. In fact, an element they intended the
reader to look at is present in the character, and it is up to the reader
to figure out which. One example would be using the character for hunger,
e, to stand in for the character for oneself, wo.

Common Marsspeak phrases

*Using letters

i becomes ai (love)

t becomes ti (kick)

r becomes a (ah)

p becomes pi (shit)

*Using numerals

0 鈥搈ei you (without)

2 鈥揺 (hungry) or er (son)

3 鈥搒han (mountain) or shan (delete)

5 鈥搘u (none)

7 鈥搎u (go)

*Variations of orz

orz 鈥� speaker is a child

OTZ 鈥� speaker i an adult

orZ 鈥� speaker has a big butt

Orz 鈥� spaker has a big head

Xrz 鈥� speaker has a crazy hairstyle

prz 鈥� speaker has hair down to the ground

What is netspeak?

Internet slang and its various "dialects," netspeak, AOL-speak, l33t and
SMS language, evolved in online messages and were refined when SMS
messages became popular. They are abbreviated or symbolic forms of
English known as a rebus. With predictive text input increasingly common,
the SMS variant is dying out.

The languages evolved from Internet shorthand used to cut down typing
time and keep up with speed in busy chat channels. When SMS debuted with
its 160 character limit, more dramatic abbreviations became common to
save time and money.

The objective is to use the fewest number of characters needed to put
across a comprehensible message. Consequentially, punctuation and grammar
are largely ignored.

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