2009-12-28

ossobuco: playing the piano, suspiciously (cosmo piano)
2009-12-28 12:32 am
Entry tags:

Open question: can haz grammar?

Okay, this is mostly directed at people who are multilingual and/or involved in online communities that are not in English. Are LOLcats, LOLspeak, et cetera popular in other languages? Whether it is related to cats or not, is there a certain humor or charm or whatever associated with phrasing things in a grammatically incorrect fashion? That is to say, in Spanish, could one say yo tiene un sabor for comedic effect?

What about words spelled so as to be incorrect but still phonetic? I'm actually having trouble thinking about how this would be done in other languages, since English spelling is so bizarre and has so many redundant letter combinations and rule exceptions that it's pretty easy to substitute alternate phonetic renderings for the correct spelling. And what about languages that decline nouns as well as conjugate verbs, or languages like Japanese that are hardly inflected at all?

I've been wondering this for a really long time, and I'm really curious now.

Sidenote: screw you, Firefox spellcheck. "Combinations" is a word.