allthingslinguistic:

false-senpai:

trisshawkeye:

hobbitguy1420:

hobbitguy1420:

darkersolstice:

runecestershire:

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.

@hobbitguy1420

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.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the class of stylized ungrammatical animal memes is that they tend to go for either orthographic stylization, often indicating modified, cute pronunciation (lolcat: teh kitteh, pupper: y r u so smol, birb: popsackles) or morphosyntactic stylization (doge: such meme, wow. lolcat: i made you a cookie but i eated it. birb: i get it you can wear pant. doggo/snek: gosh hecking darn it, doing you a frighten, booping the snoot). Even though some of these memes have both orthographic and grammatical options, they often pick just one for a particular utterance.  

In this context, “i lik the bred” does several things differently. For one, it involves both orthography and constraints on metre at the same time. Although other memes often involve a sense of comedic timing (and there’s at least one poem written in lolcat), I haven’t seen a strictly metred meme before. I also haven’t seen an animal meme not originally associated with captioned images, for that matter. 

The particular orthography is also interesting. Memish animals speak in internetspeak or babytalk, sometimes at the same time. But the stylized spelling in “i lik the bred” isn’t internettish or childish, and in particular isn’t designed to be pronounced differently – see for example the version sung to the tune of Greensleeves.

I think the Chaucerian overtones are no accident at all – the original “i lik the bred” poem by poems_for_your_sprog was indeed inspired by a historic story, technically about the 18th century but one must allow *some* poetic license. 

Despite the animal subject matter and stylized linguistic form, the origins of “i lik the bred” in text rather than images and its more sober style has more in common with tumblr text-based memes like spiders georg, the horoscope meme, regional gothic, and so on.