Introduction to 2ch-ese, part I
Posted Sep 23, 09:35 PM by Akira to 2ch (2ch)
Ever been in a room filled with people who didn’t speak your language, and felt left out? That’s what it feels like for a normal Japanese person to stumble upon 2ch. But don’t worry; I’ll be writing a series on the elusive Japanese creole known as 2ch-ese. Never feel left out again.
As a word, before we start: Yes, I consider 2ch-ese different enough from Japanese to be a creole language. As such, this won’t be your normal “guide to net-lingo” type thing. This series is meant to be serious, and it won’t be easy reading. There will probably be a glossary of commonly-used terms that concludes the series. One should probably have intermediate to advanced understanding of standard Japanese before attempting to learn 2ch. But look on the good side. You’ll never be called gaijin or chuubou again.
SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION
“2ch-ese” refers to the collective list of terms and specialized grammar concepts present within the internet community of 2channel. Most of these terms are born spontaneously and die rather spontaneously. As such, the average 2ch vocabulary changes on a virtually daily basis; what was there yesterday might very well not be there anymore today. Only a select few terms stick around long enough to be come memes. A meme is defined as an idea, phrase, or concept that propagates in a spontaneous and random manner extremely quickly through the internet. These memes become the building blocks for the language of 2ch, and the language itself could very well be defined as a large, structured conglomeration of these memes.
Note that the language of 2ch is rather specialized; it is very rare to see the average, non-2ch browsing Internet user use these terms, and it is even rarer to see a 2ch-er using everyday, “mainstream” internet lingo. Naturally, as 2ch exists on the Internet only, use of 2ch-ese in real life is highly frowned upon, and will garner strange looks and stares from everyone around the offender.
Being an anonymous textboard, the majority of 2ch-ese is rather vulgar, and most of it derogatory. This is just another reason why one should almost never speak 2ch-ese in real life; the complete lack of keigo in 2ch-ese will be sure to garner some slaps and whips in a real-life social setting.
A final note before we start: It is highly advised that, should you choose to use this guide ONLY before post on 2ch, that you do not do as such. 2ch, like any other internet community, encourages large amounts of lurking before posting. Like any other language, a textbook can only teach you so much; it is a much wiser decision for you to go and actually observe 2ch-ers “speaking” and absorbing their speech patterns before posting.
SECTION 2: COMMON WORD USAGE AND VOCABULARY
2ch-ese differs from standard Japanese in spelling and word usage, mainly in the following ways:
- Substitution
- Conscious typos
- Spoonerisms and misreadings
- Abbreviations
- Use of obsolete or arcane symbols and characters
- Proliferation of half-width Katakana
- Associations
- Memes and fads
We will now explore these in further detail.
CATEGORY ONE: SUBSTITUTION:
This is by far the largest category of words in 2ch-ese. The concept is simple: substitute a character or a word for something else. This happens in a few ways:
1. Substitution of a character for a similar character.
Examples:
a. 「ン」for「ソ」
as in: スマン －＞ スマソ
or: チョン －＞ チョソ
The second example has a practical usage. The word チョン is a rather derogatory name for Koreans. In order to avoid the word filter, most 2ch-ese refer to Koreans as チョソ.
b. 「シ」for「ツ」
as in: ヤツ －＞ ヤシ or 椰子 or 香具師
c. 「口」for「ロ」
The third is rather subtle; and can usually be identified rather easily.
2. Splitting up one word into one or more characters.
This is most often seen in the widely-used term “神”, for “god”.
People will write it as “ネ申”. This may often be confusing due to some rather strange ways of conglomerating or seperating characters. An example of this is “升”, the 2ch-ese word for a cheat in a video game, from Japanese “チート”.
3. Substituting homophones.
This happens quite often, with rather confusing results for outsiders. The most obvious and proliferated example:
厨房 (kitchen.) This term does not actually mean kitchen, it means n00b or trool. This is from the Japanese 中坊, meaning “middle school kid”, who are rather similar to n00bs or trolls. Other variations include: 消防, 攻防.
氏ね、市ね、詩ね、士ね: These are all homophones of 死ね, which means “Go die”. Quite often seen on Nico, especially in episodes of School Days.
4. Haphazardly translated English Proper Nouns
Often contains much Kanji, mainly for the purposes of not having to type a lot of katakana. Often literal.
Examples: 海門 (Seagate Tehnology), 火狐 (Firefox), 凶箱 (Xbox)
A second type of translated English relies on the use of Japanese homophones with English words.
Examples: 鯖 (Server, pronounced “saaba”), 鯛(Tights, “tai”), 膝(VISA, “hiiza”), 鱒 (MasterCard, “Masu”), 茄子 (Nurse, “nasu”) OR Diner’s Club (from ダイナースクラブ)
We now have a basic understanding of the first category of 2ch-ese words, substitutions. Here concludes part 1 of X for this series… I need to do my biology homework. ;___;
Next time, we’ll cover abbreviations such as wktk. How fitting.
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