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By He Jianwei
Original text special to Beijing
Today
"3Q d orz!"
Understand that? You're not alone. Net-speak is a growing trend among China's
younger generation of cyber-citizens, many of whom speak entirely in what, at
first glance, appears to be the malicious stompings of a cat on a keyboard.
Incidentally, the message was "Thank you sincerely." The
abbreviation-laden lingo has spread to the messages.
Actually, the same thing
has happened in English, and variations of "l33t" have spread through
online games and onto mobile devices like a virus. Some love it, and others
hate it, but regardless of your personal feelings, it's good to understand so
you can read your inbound MS messages. Sometimes that garbage isn't just your
phone's inability to display Chinese correctly.
What is Marsspeak?
Huo Xing Wen, literally
Marsspeak, is a writing style in wide use on the Internet by now grown-up 80s
kids. It is a mixture of traditional Chinese characters, English and oral
language translated into the Internet and random symbols.
Because it's difficult
to read for those unfamiliar with China's cyber-culture, it has been dubbed
Marsspeak, similar to English speakers dubbing anything not written in Latin
characters as "Moonspeak." The abbreviations originated in Taiwan
Province during the last few years, and have reached such a frightening level
of acceptance as to have appeared on Taiwan's college entrance exams. Via the
pop culture vehicles of Internet and TV, Marsspeak has sailed across the
straits and onto the mainland. Younger kids fire off MSN and Tencent QQ
messages in Marsspeak, and use it to chat on the Internet and even blog.
Deciphering Marsspeak
Marsspeak can mainly be divided into four
categories: hieroglyphics, mock sounds, combining characters and using elements
from a "mistakenly-written" character.
*Hieroglyphics
Some words in Marsspeak
are pictographs which represent the meaning of the words, such as
"orz". "orz" began as a Japanese emoticon representing a
kneeling or wing person, with "o" being the head, the "r"
being the arms and part of the body, and the "z”" being part of the
end of the body and legs. This "stick" figure represents failure. The
stick figure has grown in meaning to represent great admiration-sometimes
spiked with sarcasm-for someone else's words or action. This meaning is most
adopted in Chinese online communities.
*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
–mei you (without)
2 –e
(hungry) or er (son)
3
–shan (mountain) or shan (delete)
5
–wu (none)
7
–qu (go)
*Variations
of orz
orz
– speaker is a child
OTZ
– speaker i an adult
orZ
– speaker has a big butt
Orz
– spaker has a big head
Xrz
– speaker has a crazy hairstyle
prz
– 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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