Martian Language - General Aspects

General Aspects

The Martian language is written from Chinese by means of various substitution methods. Just like in l33t, where the letter "e" is replaced by the number "3", in Martian, standard Chinese characters are replaced with substandard ones, or foreign scripts. For each Chinese character, it may be replaced it with:

1. A character which is a homophone
2. A character which looks similar
3. A character with a similar radical
4. A character with the same or similar meaning
5. The Latin script, Cyrillic, hiragana, bopomofo, katakana, the IPA, other unicode symbols, SMS language, etc.

For example, the 星 in 火星文 huoxingwen (星 is literally "star"; 火星 is "Planet Mars") can be replaced by "☆", a Unicode symbol that visually represents an actual star. 的 is commonly replaced with の, as it has the same intended meaning in Japanese. 火 can become 吙 just by adding a 口 radical, which alters very little in terms of sound (but changes the meaning), and visually maintains the 火 image. In the same principle, 文 wen, language can be replaced with 魰 by adding a 鱼 fish radical, which makes the character still look similar. Also, 的 is sometimes replaced with "d" due to its sound, as with 比 being replaced with "b"; Cyrillic can be used in a similar manner. Martian language and brain-disabled characters overlap with one another; however, BDC only includes Chinese characters and nothing else, while Martian language incorporates BDC, as well as scripts such as Cyrillic, Hiragana, Bopomofo, SMS, and others.