So “my name is Cow… i lik the bred” seems to be the Hot New Meme, and I like it. Here’s an odd thing about it, though; a lot of the cutsey animal talk I see on the internet (especially birb-speak) sometimes reminds me of Middle English, but “lik the bred” takes it even further and sounds downright Chaucerian, and it isn’t just the rhyme and cadence. Some of the “lik the bred” pastiches I see around don’t really work because they’re in just plain doggo-fran speak (haven’t decided if Doggo-fran and Birb are the same thing or not), but the ones that really hit all the same notes as the original have something going on with the mangled vowels and spelling that’s not the same as the mangling in Doggo and/or Birb. Maybe some time I’ll gather up some examples and look closely at the vowels and spelling and try and sort out precisely what’s up.
my name is Cow i make yu think of likking bred and tayking drink i studdy buks that i have herd so wen yur gon i rite the werd.
now yu may think wen reeding this “yu typ with hoofs, wy dont yu miss?” i ask yu now be pashent, plees i type with tung i lik the kees
Re: the OP – I don’t think Doggo-fran and Birb-speak are the same at all, but it’s tricky to articulate why (probably because I’m not actually a linguist).
I think Doggo-fran revolves around intentionally switching out syllables in words (or adding them onto mono-syllabic words) – although actually I’m not sure precisely what @runecestershire is referring to here but the other thing that comes to mind is the ‘bork’ meme speak which revolves mostly around the nonsense sentence structure ‘you are doing me a [verb]’. Both cases seem to me to be a lot more specific in usage than Birb-speak.
Birb-speak revolves more around intentionally bad spelling and grammar, often with an overblown sense of urgency to imitate something being typed (and thus spoken) loudly, at high speed and with little accuracy (although there are two slightly different memetic forms of Birb-speak – one originating from the @probirdrights Twitter and the other from the @importantbirds Tumblr and their styles, while similar, are not identical).
But the OP is indeed correct that proper-sounding ‘i lik the bred’ poems have a very specific structure and language to them which is distinct again from the other examples.
I have also noticed this! I thought I was alone in thinking they sounded like middle english!!
A few of the spellings used in the “i lik the bred” poems are almost exactly the same as those in my Chaucer text.
I thought this too…
apparently every nerd on tumblr thought this and for once it took a few days for one of us to write a treatise… are we okay?
ok, see – it took me awhile to come onboard with the lik the bred meme because I assumed it was a a parody of a Chaucerian poem that I hadn’t read and I kept meaning to research it to figure out what poem it was!
I’m pretty sure it’s intentionally a Middle English pastiche isn’t it? Cos it originated in the context of a recreation medieval kitchen.
I love it, I was wondering what the next ‘animal talking in pidgin/misspelled/grammatically odd English’ meme would be.
We’ve had lolcats, doge, birbs and now this. Am I missing any?
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
O.K. is an ancient MEME.
OL KORECK!
You telling me like 100 years from now, words like “birb”, “smol”, and “bode” are gonna be actual words?
Well they kinda already are. You say or type them, others know what you mean. That’s what words and language do. Of course we have to make new ones, because we keep finding new concepts. Even if it’s ‘that thing is small but differently small than a normal small.’ Like two different shades of blue.
I love oll korrect for exactly this reason. So much of our language us just what a bunch of cool kids for two years in the 18th century thought was funny
Tearing your favourite article of clothing and discovering that it’s
irreplaceable because the technique of its manufacture has been lost
Realising you’ve thought of the perfect comeback to someone who’s been dead for three hundred years
Not being able to eat your favourite dish anymore because the source of some critical ingredient has gone extinct
Having strong opinions about sports that are no longer played
Getting a song from the 13th Century stuck in your head and being unable to get it out because you don’t remember how it ends and you’re the only person on Earth who knows it
Having that perfect pun you’ve been waiting forever for a chance to use stop working due to linguistic drift
The chinese and russian equivalents to “bring a knife to a gunfight” are “hit stones with eggs” and “there is no wrestling technique to block a crowbar”
Language can be used to persuade, amuse, insult, and mobilize action. Few formats can accomplish these goals as ably or succinctly as the protest sign.
When you make a protest sign, you’re working with considerable linguistic constraints: Space is limited by what you (and your friends) can carry, and if you’re marching, your reader will have to absorb your message quickly, making sign-writing a tough task.
Fortunately, this is where linguistics can help. Whether you’re protesting US president Donald Trump, Brexit, or college-tuition hikes, certain syntactic and rhetorical principles make the best protest signs powerful and effective. Using the example of anti-Trump protests, the following list outlines some linguistic tips to making forceful and potent pickets. […]
Rhyming
Rhymes are memorable and can help turn a sign into a chant. This is why epic sagas since the era of Beowulf have rhymed—the structure gave the bard a way to remember what came next. The meter of these phrases (what linguists refer to this as their “prosodic pattern”) also make rhyming slogans easy to remember.
CAN’T BUILD WALL / HANDS TOO SMALL MR. HATE / LEAVE MY STATE
germans: ok, so our country is called Deutschland
the french: got it. the country of Allemagne
germans: …no? that doesn’t even sound like it
the english: oh no, we got it, it’s Germany
germans: not even close
the polish: it’s Niemcy, right?
germans: how are you each getting it wrong in a completely different way
danes: Tyskland
lithuanians: Vokietija
slovakians: Nemecko
germans: …
finns: Saksa
germans: you know what? sure. whatever
Steel Phoenix Studios 