Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home.
Today in “linguists are not kidding when they say that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.” (from Atlas Obscura)
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.
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.
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.
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín – “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe – “KEE-va”
Eoghan – Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne – “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith – “EER-lah” Méabh – “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh – “NEEV” Oisín – OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith – OR-la Odhrán – O-rawn Sinéad – shi-NAYD Tadhg – TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG
As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.
This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.
No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.
The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.
Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse.
They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.
And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.
My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.
I love it when snarky quips lead to real info.
And moreover, there are some really good linguistic reasons why the Irish monks picked these particular letter combinations to stand for these particular sounds (note that this is based on a Scottish Gaelic course I took many years ago so bear with me if I get a few details wrong).
Let’s start with <bh>. Now, the Latin alphabet at the time didn’t have a letter for the /v/ sound, but it did have an alternative way of writing the /f/ sound, which was spelled <ph> when it was borrowed from Greek (for other historical reasons). Well, /p/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a burst of air out from behind your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless bilabial stop), and /f/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a small amount of air out from behind your teeth on your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless labiodental fricative). So <ph> is kind of like a more breathy <p> (/h/ is a fricative like /f/). And /b/ is the same as /p/ except your vocal cords ARE vibrating, the exact same way that /v/ is like /f/.
So <p> is to <ph> as <b> is to <bh>.
Adding <h> to a consonant to indicate a sound somewhat similar to the base letter was very common in post-Latin Europe: English, Irish, French, German, and many other European languages ended up with <ch>, <sh>, <th>, <gh>, <wh>, and so on. It just happens that some h versions are found in some languages and not others, and pretty much every language uses the h variations to stand for different sounds. (Especially “ch”).
Now let’s get to vowels. There are two groups of them: /i/ and /e/ are one group, while /u/, /o/ and /a/ are another. The traditional Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) terms for these groups are that /i, e/ are slender and /u, o, a/ are broad, but linguists also split them up, as front and back vowels.
Front vowels /i/ and /e/ tend to pull consonants along with them, in very many languages, especially /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/. It’s a process called palatalization and there’s a whole Wikipedia article about it. So the <si> in words like “Sinead” is palatalized just like the <si> in Latin-derived words like “precision” (not to mention all the words in “-tion” and rapid speech pronunciations like “didja” and “gotcha”). Palatalization also explains why English has “hard” (=broad=non-palatalized) and “soft” (=slender=palatalized) pronunciations of <c> and <g>, which are split by the same set of vowels – compare “cat” “cot” “cut” with “ceiling” or “cite”. (The pronunciation of <g> is more complicated which is why no one can agree about “gif”.)
And English spelling also retains or adds a silent letter where it would cause palatalization confusion. Think about words like “peaceable”, “placeable”, “changeable”, “salvageable” – normally a silent “e” is dropped before -able (bribable, adorable), but it’s kept here. Or the “k” added in “mimicking”, “frolicking”, “picnicking” despite “mimic, frolic, picnic”.
Irish spelling looks weird if you take English as a starting point, but if you take Latin as a starting point (which it was), both Irish and English do different (but sometimes related) weird things.
When people get all snippy about enforcing antiquated grammar rules, all I can think of is Edmund Spenser.
In the 1590’s, some dude named Edmund Spenser decided to write a flowery epic poem, basically a transparent allegory praising Queen Elizabeth. Fair enough. He was like, “I want this work to be remembered forever, so I don’t wanna use, like, MODERN SLANG or the CASUAL DISREGARD FOR GRAMMAR or FOREIGN INFLUENCE that THESE YOUNG UPSTARTS keep using. Nobody will read or understand their stuff in the future. I know, I’ll write in the style of Chaucer, because Chaucer is a ‘well of English undefiled.’ Now my piece will be a classic of pure and untainted English. 👌👌👌”
So he wrote this semi-incomprehensible fake-Chaucer poem. But FUNNNN FACT, guess who else was writing poetry in the 1590’s? Some young upstart using modern slang and casual disregard for grammar and foreign influence named William Shakespeare. And his stuff was good enough that a huge chunk of literary education is devoted to understanding his use of language… meanwhile, who’s ever heard of a Spenser Theatre Troupe, a Spenser Studies degree, or Spenser in the Park?
So ease up on that grammar policing. Shakespeare is widely praised for his inventiveness with language, creating and popularizing tons of new words and being the first recorded example of loads of common slang terms. Let’s appreciate it when 21st-century creators do the same!
/mæd madln̩/ isn’t too bad. (Although fuck non-high back vowels, incidentally.)
/stɛf/ or /stɛfəni/
[d͡ʒɒn]
Also, whith a name like that I have to ask; where is @shrewreadings from?
[ˈkl̥eɪʔn̩]
(i marked the devoicing of /l/ for the sake of narrow transcription)
[jan] – plain and simple
/ɡɹɛtʃn̩ məkʌlɪk/
Now, your linguist alternative universe name is your name in Latin orthography, pronounced as if it were already in IPA. (Interestingly, mine sounds very similar to the German pronunciation.)
326 Miles 
