Purposeful misspellings

[orchidfire]

In English, people can often purposefully misspell words, usually for a cutesy effect (as in cat macros - "I can haz cheezburger?" or "ai wubs yu!") or some other effect, usually humorous. Does this effect exist in other languages? How about those that don't follow a Roman alphabet system; what are the equivalents?

Comments

[adlina]

We do that in Malay too :) It´s not only to give our words cutesy effect, but it´s something we do to reflect our seriousness or the lack of it. Most of the misspelled words ended up being further shortened and then used as sms language.

In English, even the grammar is made purposefully wrong for a cutesy effect. In Malay, we´re the same.

I don´t know about languages that don´t follow the Roman Alphabet, though I sure as hell don´t know how to misspell Japanese characters in my essays without changing the meaning completely.

[lilacsigil]

Japanese doesn't change spelling as such, but it abbreviates words, makes "cute" endings and adds ~ for cute effects.

[ex_heracles30]

Arabic can't do that without completely making a new word, so no, it doesn't have the misspellings.

Japanese does have the cute effects like lilacsigil said. The closest I can think of for the cute effect is using broken language like a child.

[x2]

When I hear the colloquial languages they sound kind of cute to me. But that's just because I'm used to MSA. :) It's also not a misspelling issue.

As for Japanese, of course there are ways to change the spelling to sound cute. There's ra-nuki, changing vowels (especially ai -> ee) and because the language doesn't try to be subtle, there are words to add onto the end of the sentence to perfunctorily make them cute (mon, wa, etc.).

I'm a bit rusty so maybe I'm not quite sure how cute any of those are, but they exist. Manga also has fun with their furigana, for example I saw a character who was portrayed as Chinese because though he was speaking Japanese, he would use characters more common to Chinese, like 我 with the reading わたし.

[x2]

I almost forgot, there's also stuff like "Nevada-tan" because -chan just isn't cute enough and we have to start changing consonants too. :/

[adlina]

like if I say this?
悪くないもんね！
when trying to get away with sth

I´ve always thought it´s something that´s got to do with the spoken language - like slangs or something. Now i know....

[hyperbole]

I do it sometimes in Swedish, but never ever in written language. I used to do it way too much when "talking" to my rabbits a few years ago (early teens), and a little otherwise too, but not to a great extent.

I hardly ever write in Swedish outside Swedish class, so I very rarely communicate in written Swedish which means that I generally don't have a reason to use cutesy stuff there. I do it a fair bit in English, though, so if I were to start using MSN with Swedish friends more I'd probably also invent new spellings and stuff more.

[speak_candidly]

I never saw anyone misspell a word in spanish for cute effect, but they do change the grammar and have cute words or word-endings -- like pompis in mexico is kind of a childlike word, or chiquitito for double redundancy in indicating something small and adorable.

Japanese

[franzeska]

It's also common for manga and other similar things to use katakana where one would normally use hiragana or kanji (that's the blocky script instead of the curvy script or the Chinese characters). It's used for italics, allcaps shouting, and the speech of foreigners with heavy accents.

I'm sure there are plenty of other writing systems that do wacky things like that.

[elleth]

The best that comes to mind regarding German would be the use of various diminuitive suffixes for a cutesy effect, 'Mausi' or 'Hundi' instead of 'Maus' and 'Hund', 'Kindchen' instead of 'Kind', etc. However these are not misspellings, and as far as I noticed not commonly used except by little children or people in love, as some of these (like 'Mausi') also constitute terms of endearment. The general reaction, though? Annoyance.

The other thing I could think of? Onomatopoeia. 'Wauwau' is a dog, 'Mauzi' is a cat, 'Quackquack' could be a duck or a frog depending on whom you ask, etc. Again, though, not commonly used, if you did that in public would probably cost you some credibility as a serious person. :P

Hm. And of course there are borrowings. We also have the acronyms and kawaii-san fangirls, but something like LOLCats in German... I don't think that trend has come here yet. Thank CeilingCat.