UPI Says: Me Little Late Meeting Sorry Sorry

UPI came over yesterday and interviewed our Yoav.

The result is a long piece titled: Me little late meeting sorry sorry.

Some words:

"Zlango really is a different dialect. It isn't immediately understandable: the idea of "being able to" is conveyed by a beefy superhero flying to save the day, and "but" and "if" are twisted arrows.

Some of the icons, like a hand with only the middle finger extended, are fairly unmistakable.

After looking over a partial dictionary of 120 of the symbols for about 10 minutes, UPI had it down.

Pressing the "pound" key gives each picture a one-word caption, so the uninitiated can see that "puzzle, man pointing out, man pointing at himself, face with tears" means "Without you, me cry."

Lovey-dovey Zlango icons like "miss you" are popular, Lorch said, and so is that oft-used curse word conveyed by a brown pile surrounded by flies.

A quick scan of UPI's most recently sent text messages revealed that almost everything there was Zlango-translatable. "

Another interviewee for the article is Lauren Squires, a graduate student about to start a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Michigan.

"I wouldn't be surprised if novelty books at the checkout line in Barnes & Noble were written in Zlango," Squires said. "But serious works of fiction? I'd be very, very surprised."

We'll see...