㘌

What I like in pat’s writings is that his view on things are always off-centre and interesting. He’s a fellow linguist, with the same curiosity and eagerness about languages as I think I have. And with this post on LOL, he provoked amusing, if slightly off-topic – as far as teh Internets is concerned.

item:

There’s something about this usage that seems “wordy” to me: for one thing, I find it difficult to avoid a comparison to Cantonese’s famous “tag” word, la

…which led me to dig into sino-XXX to see if I could find a funky sinogram equivalent… Cantonese doesn’t have final -L, but -T, direct from Middle Chinese, like Viêtnamese, so no love. [Sino-]Korean does have final -L, evolved from Middle Chinese -T, but there’s no [lol], the closest being [lal]: 剌 [clash, contradict] and 辣 [spicy].

So I went the Idu route, find a character that has the meaning of loud laughter, and found 3:

• 㘌 kek6/ju4
• 㰤 kaa3/ke3
• 䐖 zi4/yi2

The first one is – in a “I really am off my rocker” way – a perfect candidate. 㘌’s Cantonese reading, kek, looks almost like a typo, and sounds like something having a derisive laugh, and it is based on 劇 kek6/ju4 – theatrical plays, drama, opera– and 口 hau2/kou3, the mouth, which is fitting… So there you go, LOL = 㘌.

㘌!