Jive, also known as the Jive Filter, is a novelty computer program

Computer program

A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...

 that converts plain English to a comic dialect known as "jive", a parody of African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...

. Some versions of the filter were adapted to parody other forms of English speech, such as valspeak

Valspeak

Valleyspeak or Valspeak is a common name for an American sociolect, originally of Los Angeles, California, in particular Valley girls. This stereotype, which originated in the 1970s, became an international fad for a certain period...

, cockney

Cockney

The term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End...

, geordie

Geordie

Geordie is a regional nickname for a person from the Tyneside region of the north east of England, or the name of the English-language dialect spoken by its inhabitants...

, Pig Latin

Pig Latin

Pig Latin is a language game of alterations played in English. To form the Pig Latin form of an English word the first consonant is moved to the end of the word and an ay is affixed . The object is to conceal the meaning of the words from others not familiar with the rules...

, and even the Swedish Chef

Swedish Chef

The Swedish Chef is a Muppet that appeared on The Muppet Show. He was operated by Jim Henson and Frank Oz simultaneously and is now puppeteered by Bill Barretta.-Character:...

. The latter form is sometimes known as the "Encheferator" or "Encheferizer". This family of programs became quite popular in the late 1980s.

The program is very simple and has been duplicated or translated many times on many different programming platforms and many different forms, for instance as a CGI

Common Gateway Interface

The Common Gateway Interface is a standard method for web servers software to delegate the generation of web pages to executable files...

 application to run on a website to translate text typed by visitors into a comic dialect.

The program in its classic form is a simple filter that performs text substitution on its input stream to produce an output form. For instance "black" when preceded by a space is always translated to "brother" and "come" when surrounded by spaces is always translated to "mosey on down".

The original author of the jive filter (and its sister, the valspeak filter) is unknown. Its earliest known appearance was when it was submitted to the USENET

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 group net.sources in September, 1986 by a contributor from JPL called Adams Douglas, who was not the author of the program. He resubmitted it to mod.sources.games in April 1987. This version is still downloadable from archives of that group and still compiles and runs on Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

. The program was discussed in net.sources in March, 1986 and was apparently quite well known.

Borking

At one stage of the Scientology internet wars

Scientology versus the Internet

"Scientology versus the Internet" refers to a number of disputes relating to the Church of Scientology's efforts to suppress material critical of Scientology on the Internet through the use of lawsuits and legal threats. In late 1994, the Church of Scientology began using various legal tactics to...

 of the mid-1990s, some opponents of the church's fight to pursue unauthorized publishing of some of its scriptures using copyright and trade secret law adopted the ruse of publishing copies that had first been garbled, "borked", or "borkified", by passing them through the Jive filter or the "encheferizer". The holder of the copyright on the church's scriptures, Religious Technology Center

Religious Technology Center

The Religious Technology Center is a Californian non-profit corporation. RTC was founded in 1982 by the Church of Scientology in order to control and oversee the use of all of the trademarks, symbols and texts of Scientology and Dianetics, including the copyrighted works of Scientology founder and...

, sued in some cases, for instance in Scientology versus Zenon Panoussis (Stockholm, 1998). Samples of the scriptures translated in this way were submitted in evidence. The defendants claimed that this was parody; the plaintiffs, violation of copyright.

External links

• Metadata and downloadable source of original submission of jive-val to mod.sources.games
  • Contains lex
    Lex programming tool
    Lex is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers . Lex is commonly used with the yacc parser generator. Lex, originally written by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt, is the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix systems, and a tool exhibiting its behavior is specified as part of the...
    
     sources and Makefile for Unix
    Unix
    Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
    
    . Compiles on most Unix-like operating systems.
• Online Jive/Chef/Valspeak translator (also has downloadable source programs)
• Web-based humor filters (Yahoo!
  Yahoo!
  Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
  
  )
• The Encheferizer, a program which "translates" English into Mock Swedish.
• The Dialectizer, which can translate webpages into comic dialects.
• Google Bork, Bork, Bork!, Google interface in Mock Swedish.
• Veekipedia, zee free-a incyclupedeea - Wikipedia's Swedish Chef
  Swedish Chef
  The Swedish Chef is a Muppet that appeared on The Muppet Show. He was operated by Jim Henson and Frank Oz simultaneously and is now puppeteered by Bill Barretta.-Character:...
  
  page translated into Swedish Chef.
• GNU Talk Filters converts ordinary English text into text that mimics a comic dialect.
• Gizoogle a search engine that presents its results in "gangsta" slang.
  • The Wikipedia main page translated by Gizoogle
• Swedish Chef Translator Visual Basic Source
• Gizoogle Simple Google Gangsta Google Translator.