I was taking a German class in college, and a few weeks into the course we each had to write a short essay about ourselves. I said it “sounds Ich-y.” Nobody got it.
Funny, I’ve been watching my West Wing DVDs and the last episode I watched yesterday was the one where Margaret tells Leo the “un oeuf” joke. I found it a lot more amusing that I probably should have. Especially since I’ve seen the episode a million times.
Aren’t these bilingual or translingual puns that depend on the reader knowing meanings in two languages? They are only understandable if you know both languages.
Here is a non-English pun: la korpekzercisto estas kolego (“the bodybuilder is a colleague”). The word kolego can mean both ‘colleague’ and ‘big neck’ in Esperanto, so the phrase can also mean “the bodybuilder is a bigneck”.
I struggled with the thread title - I guess I didn’t struggle hard un oeuf. Yes, translingual puns are what I’m after. Please don’t throw Pierre off the bridge
“Waiter, when will I become a steak?”
“Never, I hope!”
(In german, bekommen means “to get” or “to receive.”)
Also, “We are the champignons” was an ad campaign I saw while in Germany, I forget exactly what for, but the illustration was a bunch of mushrooms. (Champignon is german for mushroom.)
There is an island called Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore in Italy (meaning beautiful island) It is named after Isabella, whose husband, Carlo III Borromeo (1538-84), built the palace and terraced gardens for her as a wedding present. I think that qualifies as a pun.
A clothing store salesman is trying to help a Spanish-speaking customer. Needless to say, the salesman doesn’t speak Spanish and the customer doesn’t speak English. The salesman resorts to holding up articles of clothing and asking “Is this what you want?”
After about an hour of this, the exasperated salesman finally holds up a pair of socks, asking “Is this what you want?” The delighted customer exclaims, “Ah, eso si que es!”
The salesman grumbles, “Well, hell, if you’d have spelled it in the first place, you’d have saved us both a lot of trouble.”
Joke: “Eso si que es” translates roughly as “That’s it.”
I’m foggy on the details, but I recall from French calss in high school that some French leader (maybe even Napoleon) married an Austrian noble woman and the French joke at the time was calling her “une autre chien” (another dog) which sounds like Une Autrichienne (an Austrian).
Thanks for that… I didn’t know about the baiser ambiguity. In grade school we, of course, got as much mileage as we could with the French word for “seal” - that being the notorious “phoque” which is pronounced closer to “fuck” than “folk”
French class:
Us: Teacher, teacher! What’s the word for seal again?
Teach: :rolleyes: C’est un phoque.
Us: Tee hee hee!
Math class:
Us: Phoque!
Teach: What did you say?
Us: Oh, nothing bad - just seal in French (tee hee hee)
