Entry: Argotify, french slangifier

[WhiteFangs]

My last year's NaNoGenMo was about generating a theater piece novel out of the French 4chan-like forums of jeuxvideo.com. The aim was to recontextualize the worst of the French internet dialogues into a highly classical form (The result is here).

Now this year, I plan to do kind of the opposite : create a program that takes any given text and transforms it into French slang. I think it would be fun to read Descartes' Discourse on the Method in French slang for example. One of the inspirations for this idea is the French-famous Les boloss des Belles Lettres (it would translate in english as The Belles-Lettres' losers) who write summaries of literature classics in French slang.

There are many different ways of slang in French, I will try to implement several of them, as best as I can. Here's a list of French slang features I would like to implement:

• [ ] Verlan (≈ Pig Latin in English?): cutting the word in two between two syllables and reverse the parts. Example: Ripou is the verlan of Pourri
• [ ] Wesh: adding slang words or exclamations like "wesh", "gros", "sisi", "tkt", "tmtc", that are just used as punctuation ("Wesh" is the equivalent of "Yo" in English)
• [ ] SMS writing: simplifying the writing of words using shortcuts like in English for example when you write sk8 instead of skate
• [ ] Poseyyy: emphasizing the endings of words that finish with the sound "é" by adding "eyyyy". Sometimes also duplicating the first syllables in the word, for example here: Poposeyyy (a slang made famous by a strange rapper(?) called Swagg man)
• [ ] Other: multiplying the punctuations (typical internet comment writing style), etc ?

Maybe I aim to do many different slang styles and features so I was thinking to also implement a range input for every feature so that users can choose its degree in the text transformation.

The program could be on a webpage using a textarea field for text input, but I would prefer it as a browser extension that allows it to be run on any visited webpage using Chrome or Firefox. It will be coded in Javascript.

I already have some resources for working on French syllables in a small JS package I created called metriques.js. I know how to create a Chrome extension but not Firefox so some advice about this would be helpful. Also, the goal of the extension being to alter the text content of a webpage, finding a code that already implements this kind of idea would be a good inspiration.

I would also love feedback on the idea or any information that would be help me in the project, even not in French!

[enkiv2]

Are you planning to use just conventional verlan, or are you planning to reverse the syllables of every word? (I remember coming across verlan while looking at various cants, some of which are very similar -- there's an australian cant involving reversing the spelling of each word, for instance -- and discovering that in many of these, certain words when modified in this way took on their own meanings. For instance, meuf has different connotations than femme from which it is derived, and likewise with yob and boy in the similar english version.)

Is there a french equivalent to cockney rhyming slang? (This is wherein certain words will be substituted with entire phrases that rhyme, and, conventionally over time these phrases become shortened and new rhymes are added as rhymes for the shortened form. For instance "stairs" -> "apples and pears" -> "apples".)

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 10:29 AM Bilgé Kimyonok [email protected] wrote:

My last year's NaNoGenMo https://github.com/WhiteFangs/theatre-jeuxvideocom was about generating a theater piece novel out of the French 4chan-like forums of jeuxvideo.com. The aim was to recontextualize the worst of the French internet dialogues into a highly classical form (The result is here http://louphole.com/divers/Le%20jeuxvideocom%20de%20l'amour%20et%20du%20hasard.html ).

Now this year, I plan to do kind of the opposite : create a program that takes any given text and transforms it into French slang. I think it would be fun to read Descartes' Discourse on the Method in French slang for example. One of the inspirations for this idea is the French-famous Les boloss des Belles Lettres http://bolossdesbelleslettres.tumblr.com/ (it would translate in english as The Belles-Lettres' losers) who write summaries of literature classics in slang French.

There are many different ways of slang in French, I will try to implement several of them, as best as I can. Here's a list of French slang features I would like to implement:

• Verlan (≈ Pig Latin in English?): cutting the word in two between two syllables and reverse the parts. Example: Ripou is the verlan of Pourri
• Wesh: adding slang words or exclamations like "wesh", "gros", "sisi", "tkt", "tmtc", that are just used as punctuation ("Wesh" is the equivalent of "Yo" in English)
• SMS writing: simplifying the writing of words using shortcuts like in English for example when you write sk8 instead of skate
• Poseyyy: emphasizing the endings of words that finish with the sound "é" by adding "eyyyy". Sometimes also duplicating the first syllables in the word, for example here: Poposeyyy (a slang made famous by a strange rapper(?) called Swagg man)
• Other: multiplying the punctuations (typical internet comment writing style), etc ?

Maybe I aim to do many different slang styles and features so I was thinking to also implement a range input for every feature so that users can choose its degree in the text transformation.

The program could be on a webpage using a textarea field for text input, but I would prefer it as a browser extension that allows it to be run on any visited webpage using Chrome or Firefox. It will be coded in Javascript.

I already have some resources for working on French syllables in a small JS package I created called metriques.js https://github.com/WhiteFangs/metriques.js. I know how to create a Chrome extension but not Firefox so some advice about this would be helpful. Also, the goal of the extension being to alter the text content of a webpage, finding a code that already implements this kind of idea would be a good inspiration.

I would also love feedback on the idea or any information that would be help me in the project, even not in French!

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[WhiteFangs]

I'm planning to use verlan in two ways :

• some words's verlan will be hardcoded because they are special and don't work with an algorithm (the example you gave with the word "meuf" is one of them)
• for the rest I will make it a bit randomly. I don't plan to slangify (or verlanify) all the content, because that's never what we do when we speak in slang (or verlan), but just some words, chosen semi-randomly (I will make some heuristics to see what's best) that will be turned into verlan by cutting the word at a syllable and reversing the two parts.

To give an example, the algorithm I'm thinking of would work like this for a word like "voiture":

• cut the word in syllables : voi-tu-re
• cut the word in two parts after a syllable : voitu-re or voi-ture (choose randomly? or semi-randomly? I'll see how it goes)
• reverse the two parts: revoitu or turevoi (this last one is actually the most understandable in French, but again I'll make some trials to the best rules to implement)

The change of connotation that you talk about is precisely the kind of effect I want to produce using the program! :)

I don't think there's something like cockney rhyming slang in French, not that I'm aware of...

[WhiteFangs]

I started working on it a week ago but didn't create a repo until I found a good name so here it is now : Argotify

Currently I work on the first chapter of the Discourse on the Method from Descartes using a simple HTML page. My next steps are :

• Add range inputs for different types of slang
• Transform the program into a browser extension

And of course improve iteratively the transformation algorithm.

[WhiteFangs]

I finished my entry by slangifying L'Éducation sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert, the result is available here : http://louphole.com/divers/L%C3%89dukation%20sentimentale,%20Gustave%20Flobert.html

I created 3 versions of the program, one Chrome extension (download), one Firefox add-on still in review queue at the moment, and a web page version with a textarea (available in the repo here).