paradoxcase:

(Hooray, sleepless night, queuing this post for a relatively sane time when I may not actually be awake.)

The latest chapter of One of Our Submarines had a lot of weird uses of 8 for “eight-sounds” in Vriska’s quirk that made me question if I’d been doing it wrong the one or two times I’ve tried to write it. So, being the weird insomniac that I am, I spent hours rereading all of Vriska’s pesterlogs and carefully recording all the instances of 8 used as an “eight-sound”. Here is the resulting analysis, with a little bit of linguistics.

Some background: the “eight” sound is represented in IPA as eɪt, with the eɪ being the “long a” vowel. I’m using IPA because English is pretty shit for talking about sounds in. Disclaimer: this is based on my fairly standard western American accent. Your mileage may vary.

I’ve divided these into five different places where 8 was used. In order, they are:

1. As a complete replacement for a sequence pronounced as eɪt
2. As a replacement for a sequence pronounced eɪ, followed by a t that was written out (e.g. “w8ting” instead of “w8ing”)
3. As a replacement for a sequence pronounced eɪ in any other context
4. As a replacement for a sequence consisting of a vowel other than eɪ and a t
5. As a replacement for a vowel other than eɪ followed by a t that was written out

The complete list is here, with the panel numbers in brackets and the words involving 8 listed next to them (lines with asterisks next to them indicate that the words were taken from lines or logs where Vriska was freaking out and dropping 8s all over the place, and therefore may not be strictly accurate). It is pretty repetitive.

There are actually a few places where there were perfectly good eɪt words that Hussie did not spell using an 8; in particular, the pesterlog on panel 5594 has “w8ing”, but the one on panel 5749 has “waiting” despite being otherwise identical. There are many, many, many, many instances of eɪ and vowels followed by t that are not spelled 8.

“Create” (and morphological variations) is used frequently, and always spelled “cre8te” rather than “cre8”.

Note that words spelled with -ation do not actually contain an eɪt phonetically, but it is arguable that they contain one phonemically, which basically means that people mentally construct an eɪt being present even if they are technically pronouncing something slightly different, but I think this is a distinction that people are often consciously aware of (whereas a lot of other canonical English phonetic/phonemic distinctions are not). Almost all of the 8s that simply replace eɪ in unambiguous pesterlogs are either in -ation words, “8r8k”, or “8n’t”. A weird thing happens on panel 5812 - previously, -ation words with 8 would be spelled “8tion” (e.g. “convers8tion”), but in that one pesterlog there are two -ation words spelled “8ion” (“ostent8ious”, “inclin8ions”), where the 8 technically replaces a sequence pronounced eɪʃ.

The complete list of words in the “other vowels” sections that are not from questionable pesterlogs is “inconsider8”, “ultim8”, “deli8er8ly”, “vers8tile”, and “temper8ture”. None of these can be pronounced with eɪt in my dialect (if you want to be understood), but they are also places where there is arguably a phonemic (mentally constructed) eɪt where the vowel is just very lax due to the stress pattern. Also note that all of these words are spelled with at(e).

In conclusion:

1. Simply replacing eɪ with 8 is probably not merited unless Vriska is upset (at which point it actually happens pretty frequently), or in the case of “8r8k”, “8n’t” (which is Vriska’s only real deviation from standard English, presumably for the sake of the quirk) and -ation words.
2. Replacing syllables that end in t with 8 is probably not merited when Vriska is not upset, unless they are words like “inconsiderate” that are spelled with “ate” and may actually be phonemically eɪt.
3. -ation words can probably be spelled either “8tion” or “8ion”, although the former is far more common.