For fuck’s sake, I can barely understand half of what people post in the comments section. I understand that it’s all light-hearted and fluffy and whatnot, but yeesh. Some of that stuff is almost completely illegible.
I might be a wee bit on the cranky side today, but is this shit really necessary?
They already translated the Bible into LOLCATS, you know.
Not a joke…
Technically, it’s not a pidgin.
What Inner Stickler said.
A pidgin is a first generation creole that mashes two or more languages together in an extremely simplified manner so a blended population can do business and socialize. By the time the kids of that generation start talking, it’s usually matured into its own full language with a blend of vocabulary from the contributing languages and its own unique grammatical structure and syntax.
LOLcat is a dialect or variant of a language with its own unique pronunciation, syntax, orthography, or other aspect that is distinctly different from the parent language but still mutually intelligible to both parties.
Doodz, Ogre, I skoolz U!!!11!!!elebenty!
One problem is that nobody is growing up speaking Lolcat as their native language. The people who are learning it are people who already speak English, and it is a lot easier for an English speaker to learn Lolcat than it is for them to learn, say, Swahili. Also, because nobody uses it as their primary language, it hasn’t really had to deal with cultural issues that languages face. Have there been any scientific/academic papers written in Lolcat? How do you cite sources in Lolcat?
<humor>
src, d00d:
Adams, Cecilcat. internets. StraightDope.com. Elebenty 2, dec. 2011. kthx
</humor>
Aren’t dialects regionally bounded? The internet transcends geography. I would call lolcats a register.
And a programming language: http://lolcode.com/
The examples in the OP look like fairly standard colloquial English that has been deliberately misspelled. Most are apparently meant to look like a semi-literate person (or cat!) was attempting to write words based on how they sound. Tee = tea, ov = of, sooving = soothing, slyce = slice, etc. I don’t think it’s very difficult to understand, you just have to sound it out. I wouldn’t worry about the future of the English language, as I feel like I’ve seen basically the same kind of humor used in 19th century literature with the speech or writing of characters who are uneducated or speak with a heavy accent.
Siiiiigh.
You must admit, this is a much more interesting thread than if we’d all just said, “Damn cats, damn pics, damn captions.”
LOLspeek iz alreddi a lanwidg. Srsly.
d00d, yew need to chillz.
There’s a lot of stupid crap on the internet that I can just shrug off, but nothing - NOTHING - sets my teeth on edge quite like this. If I were allowed to permanently remove one thing from the internet, it’d be this. It just absolutely infuriates me with the stupidity.
umad, bro?
But does the misspelling drive the word choice? If different words are chosen for the effect of how the word appears with the different spelling then it is not just standard colloquial english.
I agree with InnerStickler; it’s a register.
And the lolcode cracked my ass up:
COUNT!!1:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
FILEZORZ:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE FILE
O NOES
INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE
I’m a bit frightened that it makes sense to me. It’s certainly no worse than COBOL.
It grates on me something fierce too, but there is a small upside; it appears to be entirely confined to the ICanHasCheezburger site, and only the cat section at that. It’s very easy to avoid.
This sets your teeth on edge? This? Talk about misplaced priorities…
Oh noes! Y no luv? Y hat?