The Gospel according to kitty

By From the Chicago Tribune

last updated: January 04, 2008 08:30:17 AM

A 16th-century English Protestant priest named Miles Coverdale was the first person to translate the entire Bible into English. Since then, linguists have completed about 75 English-language translations of the Bible.

Next: The kitty pidgin Bible.

Lolcatbible.com is busy translating the Bible into the language of lolcats. The site invites readers to help with the translation, and it claims 30 percent of the Bible has been translated thus far.

Lolcats ("lol" is short for "laugh out loud") is a recent Internet phenomenon. Cat owners take pictures of their feline friends, add cute or silly captions to the pictures, then post them on the Internet, namely lolcats.com. The language known as kitty pidgin has evolved from the many thousands of lolcats pictures.

Kitty pidgin is designed to outrage English teachers and gurus of grammar. Subject-verb agreement is discouraged, abbreviations and creative spellings are common. For instance, "hi" becomes "hai" and "chicken" becomes "chikn." Plural words end with "z," "I am" becomes "I iz" and "the" is spelled "teh."

The most famous example of lolcats: A gray and overweight kitty nicknamed Happycat staring inquisitively toward the camera with a caption that reads, "I can has cheezburger?"

Yes, either you think all this is funny ... or you don't.

The effort to translate the Bible into a language full of grammatical errors, hacker acronyms and Internet lingo may appear distasteful or blasphemous to some, but not to worry. Much of the translation only loosely follows the Bible. It's crowded with references to lolcats pictures and to ambiguous Internet humor, and these references can only be understood by people who spend too much time on the Web.

Example from lolcatbible.com: "At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, 'i can haz lite?' An lite wuz." You get the idea.

There have been translations of other books into kitty pidgin, including T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." ("april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has/april in ur memoriez, making ur desire.") Of course, T.S. Eliot and the writers of Scripture are no longer here to defend themselves.

Lolcats has begat lolbirds, loldogs — even lolhumans. One image circulating on the Web features Nancy Pelosi being sworn in as speaker of the House with the caption, "I'm in ur house impeaching ur doodz." Pelosi is in position to defend herself, but so far has not seen lolhumans as a political threat.

Nor, would we guess, is this a threat to proper English. Just a reason to LOL.

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