My Languages!

This is the display page for my made-up language: Oatanese.

You may have come here because you're curious what languages I speak, but I'm sorry to tell you I only speak English fluently. (I took two years of Spanish in school--enough to ask where the bathroom is and insult you by calling you a weasel--and I know some very basic and silly phrases in Japanese, but that's it.) This page is really about showing you the language I made up. I have a code language that I like to write in, and it's called Oatanese. The language's first version was basically a very obvious English cipher with difficult-and-involved-to-write representative letters featuring things that started with the letter they represented (think letter L looking like a lizard, or letter E looking like an eye). But this was cumbersome and very stupid-looking, and Oatanese evolved into something that was much faster to write and less easy to figure out. It was in its basically modern evolution by the time I was about fifteen. My high school friend Mia influenced me in naming it; there was a guy who went by "Oatie" in a band we joked about once, and somehow we decided to apply "Oat" to this language (which I had taught to her at one point so we could write horrible things to each other without anyone knowing). Originally we called it "Oatian" but discovered it sounded like "Ocean" and thus became confusing. It became Oatanese. One way to easily "crack" a code based on the English alphabet is usually to see which letters are used alone and assume they're either "A" or "I," so we invented a third stand-alone letter by blending the O and the P together to get the letter "Po." It doesn't really mean anything, but the Oatanese alphabet has 27 letters, and occasionally you just throw in a "Po" to throw people off. It's also correct in Oatanese to deliberately misspell words so they are more phonetic. It does not have capitals or lowercase. I am not going to clue you in on how to read it, because it IS after all my secret script that now gets used when I want to write something private to myself. I used to use it to write down notes about stupid customers while working at the bookstore, and definitely to write in my teenage diaries to keep curious folks away, and currently I even have little notes to myself stuck on my computer at work and at home in this code. But even though I won't teach you to read it, here are three examples: Ordinary writing example, blue shiny pen: Trying to write in clearer, neater handwriting, orange Sharpie: Very messy message, written in purple Sharpie: I even made a font with a free font-maker once. Here are a couple typed examples: Looks fun, huh? Well, it sure beats having your family members read your diary. ;)

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CREDITS: The Background Boutique: This page's background.