We are all familiar with English creative misspellings- be it leetspeak, text talk, LOLZ speak, whatever. If you see some graffiti on an American bathroom wall, it’s almost certainly going to be purposefully misspelled in some way. And I know other languages have this, too. I have some friends who love to try to talk to me in French text-talk.
So does Chinese have anything like this? Or are the hoodlums here tagging walls in textbook perfect hanzi?
no clue, but now i have the mental image of some little old man or lady going around with red spray paint correcting the graphology=)
At first I thought about mentioning Chinese slang (which of course exists), but then I wondered if there’s a direct parallel to leetspeak… and there IS! Wikipedia tells all: The Chinese article on leespeak has a section on Chinese leetspeak, also known as “Martian Language” in the English encyclopedia.
My Chinese is pretty bad, but the Wikipedia seems to suggest that Martian Language doesn’t seem to use keyboard-lookalikes as much as homonyms, phonetic symbols (Bopomofo) in place of full characters, cross-dialect/cross-language soundalikes, Wingdings/symbol fonts in place of characters, stuff like that. Ghettoleet, in other words 
But fascinating nonetheless.
I think that, due to the tonal nature of Chinese, and the replication of the same pronunciation by many different characters and meanings, puns are more likely to be used.
But, “creative misspelling” does have its own particular Chinese character and history. One particularly famous (if unintentional and perhaps apocryphal) example of this comes from the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor - 雍正 Yong Zheng , Harmonious Justice, reigned during the early-mid Qing dynasty, between 1722 to 1735. His time was prosperous, but he was kind of a paranoid guy.
At this time, the Civil Service examinations involved writing an 8-legged essay on some part of Confucius’ Analects. The student would get a prompt, and they would base their composition off of that prompt. Over time, it became more and more difficult to find new phrases from the Analects, so, examiners would have to get more creative and choose increasingly obscure and tiny snippets of the Analects. One examiner, Cha Siting of Zhejiang Haining, in the 4th year of Yongzheng’s reign, assigned this prompt to his students:
维民所止… “Weimin Suozhi” (For the people… ). Perfectly Normal exam type question, right? But look at the first character in Yong zheng, Yong, and the first character in Weimin Suozhi, Wei.
Yong —> 雍 维 <---- Wei
Notice how they are almost exactly the same, except that the top part of Yong, the head, is missing from Wei! Now, I know some people might just say that was a coincidence… Until you see the comparison of the character for Zheng from Yongzheng and the character for Zhi from the exam question:
Zheng —> 正 止 <— Zhi
Again, the character is missing its head! Clearly, this was a call from Cha Siting to behead the Emperor. Cha Siting was duly executed himself for this treason.
I am not a Chinese speaker, but I imagine that this type of creative misspelling happens today. There are also a bunch of websites you can find on Google for “Chinese Internet Slang” to see what the kids are doing with the language if you want an equivalent to leet.
There are cute little acronyms in roman letters. One I’ve heard of is Hong Kong residence texting 5D5D (or some repetition of 5D) to tell each other to hurry up. If you say “5D” aloud, it sounds like Cantonese for “hurry up!”
Thanks guys! It is pretty fascinating.
I forgot about cute acronyms. I get a lot of “88” (ba ba) for “bye bye” in texts and the like.
Grass mud horse, anyone?
Not Chinese, but I always thought in Japan it was cute when I would see a road sign or text message that said “39”, read as “san kyu”, meaning “thank you”.
Road sign, as in something written on the side of the road? Who or what are they thanking?
There are cases when leaving out a stroke or using a different stroke change the meaning of a word entirely. During the Mooncake Festival, there is a tradition to have such puzzles. The puzzle gives clue as to what is the main Chinese character and what strokes to drop, or to add, and you have to guess what is the answer from there.
I am not well-versed with it. I’ll be back when I find an example.
I managed to find one which I can understand:
Puzzle: 多一个工人，多一分力
Answer: 功夫
Translated to English, it means “One more worker, one additonal strength”.
Now, work in Chinese is 工。
Strength is 力。
Put those two together, you got 功
Now, 人 means human being - an anarchic form of referring to one is 夫 (example: 夫君 == husband). Specifically, 夫 is to refer to the male gender.
Together, it becomes 功夫 or popular known as “kung fu”.
I know this is not a misspelling, but honestly, puzzles which involve removing strokes or adding new one are beyond my understanding. (It took me a while to figure this one)
For those who can read Chinese, here’s a list.
Found another one which I can understand - this time is a form of ‘misspelling’.
Question: 一针见血 (seeing blood with a single poke of the needle)
Answer: 皿 (container)
This is unlike the previous one where you combine characters together. Certain strokes within the phrase give a clue as to whether it is to add a stroke or to remove. For example, 针 (needle) has the stroke ／ inside it (lower-left hand) and it gives the clue that perhaps you can need to remove a stroke.
The answer 皿 has one stroke missing (compared it to 血).
Really complicated puzzles have different ‘clues’ together, and combining different clue strokes together may mean different things. It’s a really complicated game where sometimes it plays on puns, sometimes it require you to know the strokes and the clue. As someone who take Chinese as a second language, it’s beyond me really 
(Explanation, in Chinese are from the same link above)
I posted about this recently with regard to swearing.
In Hong Kong, putting a character inside the character for “door” can render it an obscenity.
Thus “siu” (little) inside “mun” (door) becomes “diu”, meaning “fuck”. “Sai” (seven) inside mun becomes “hai”, meaning “cunt”. There are several more like this, and there’s a special character set supplement that takes these, and several other Hong Kong-specific characters, into account.