By He Jianwei (Beijing Today)
Updated: 2007-09-12 09:53

*Mock sounds

Marsspeakers use Arabic numerals and Latin letters to stand in for characters with similar sounds, for example, using the digit "4" to stand in for si, death, or shi, yes. They also combine in English netspeak such as "u" in place of "you".

*Combining characters

Chinese characters are usually constructed from several elements, or radicals. In Marsspeak, writers break up characters into several pieces, so a character like qiang could be written as the characters gong and sui. Readers reassemble the parts to figure out what character was intending to say.

*Mistakenly-written

The exact opposite is done with these characters, where the intended character is embedded within another. At first glance, it looks like someone just made a careless typo. In fact, an element they intended the reader to look at is present in the character, and it is up to the reader to figure out which. One example would be using the character for hunger, e, to stand in for the character for oneself, wo.

Common Marsspeak phrases

*Using letters

i becomes ai (love)

t becomes ti (kick)

r becomes a (ah)

p becomes pi (shit)

*Using numerals

0 –mei you (without)

2 –e (hungry) or er (son)

3 –shan (mountain) or shan (delete)

5 –wu (none)

7 –qu (go)

*Variations of orz

orz – speaker is a child

OTZ – speaker i an adult

orZ – speaker has a big butt

Orz – spaker has a big head

Xrz – speaker has a crazy hairstyle

prz – speaker has hair down to the ground

What is netspeak?

Internet slang and its various "dialects," netspeak, AOL-speak, l33t and SMS language, evolved in online messages and were refined when SMS messages became popular. They are abbreviated or symbolic forms of English known as a rebus. With predictive text input increasingly common, the SMS variant is dying out.

The languages evolved from Internet shorthand used to cut down typing time and keep up with speed in busy chat channels. When SMS debuted with its 160 character limit, more dramatic abbreviations became common to save time and money.

The objective is to use the fewest number of characters needed to put across a comprehensible message. Consequentially, punctuation and grammar are largely ignored.

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