#colang — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Cuestionable idea of the day: Learn a language that's isn't spoken in your country to confuse the hell of telemarketers and scammers.

For example, if you are in a country where they speak Greek, reply in Spanish, or viceversa. This works because Greek and Spanish have similar sounds but are very distantly related, so it will come through as gibberish; same for Portuguese and Russian.

It doesn't even need to be a real language! If you are in a country where they speak English, try to pull a "Prisencolinensinainciusol" on them!

If you are into conlanging and linguistics you can do some extra funny stuff here. Talk to them in Klingon, Toki Pona, Classical Latin, Akkadian, or your very own constructed language!

You can open with something like "allo?" when picking up the phone as it is common in many real languages. Use words that sound like something they said to you when following up so they think you are engaged!

Make them feel like their brain is melting while wasting as much of their time as possible!

And yes: I do do this with Bemmet, my conlang, and I think telemarketers and scammers have begun blacklisting my number because I stopped getting calls from them :nano:

#linguistics #colang #conlanging