I was talking to my kids about the differences between languages yesterday - my daughter (11) mostly gets it, my son (9) is still not quite convinced that foreign languages aren’t just a simple case of letter-substitution ciphers (a trap I fell into myself when I was about his age, I seem to recall).
Anyway, as an example of how languages work differently, I took a piece of dialogue from *Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit *.
So there’s a play on words between ‘hair’ and ‘hare’, also ‘toupée’ and ‘to pay’. I explained that these jokes would probably be impossible to literally translate into many other languages because in those languages, the word for ‘hair’ is unlikely to sound like the word meaning ‘hare’.
But it got me to thinking; I’m sure this sort of wordplay is by no means unique to English, so there must be examples of it in say, Spanish, that can’t be translated to English without breaking them.
So… Does anyone have any examples of this in non-English languages and also, does anyone know of any languages in which these constructions are uncommon or absent altogether?
I used to go with friends to the National Library in Canberra when I was at high school. For a while we had an obsession with Freud’s *Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious *. Most of the jokes were puns that made sense in German but read like nonsense in English. We would learn one and then drop it innapropriately in conversation.
I remember one went something like “In der hast der schreiben die Inder hast verschreiben” which meant in his haste to write the prescription the Indian doctor miswrote it.
I recently spotted this wikipedia page which is kind of the opposite but should provide another talking point.
“And our sonnets!” said Michel Chrestien. “Wouldn’t they earn for us Petrarch’s triumph?”
“Laura* is already involved,” said Dauriat, whose pun excited general acclaim.
*The French version of the name (Laure) is pronounced the same as l’or, “gold.”
By way of context, the story is about the corruptions of the press, and how favorable reviews, and hence success, of any artistic work can be had for a price.
Nothing profound or at all funny here, but some schoolkids in Japan taught me these one day:
Futon ga futtonda. (The futon flew)
Arumikan ni aru mikan. (An orange in an aluminum can.)
Iruka wa iruka? (Is there a dolphin?)
Nashi wa nashi. (There are no pears.)
Shou ga nai. Shoga nai. (There’s no ginger. There’s nothing we can do about it.)
This is stuff like kids say on the playground. Adults are just annoyed by them.
I made one up which I swear is grammatically correct to my knowledge, but nevertheless no Japanese person could understand it. I must have something wrong:
Ankara kara dakara, karai. (It’s supposed to mean ‘Since its from Ankara, it’s spicy.’)
-FrL-
(I think in retrospect I know what the problem is with the phrase. I thought of “dakara” as being just the word “da” followed by the word “kara,” as though the “da” in “dakara” could act as a copula in a dependent clause. I now think, from memory of further experience with the language, that “dakara” doesn’t work like that. But I’m not sure. Anyone know? How about “Ankara kara da. Dakara karai?”)
My JET friend tells me Japanese has a whole genre of “old man jokes,” involving the substitution of slightly different sounding words to make a pun. I wish I had some examples.
In Wagner’s Meistersinger, Beckmesser’s attempt at Walther’s prize-song is a hilarious bungling of the original. Examples:
Original: “Sei euch vertraut, welch hehres Wunder mir gescheh’n:” (To you be confided, what sublime wonder befell me).
Beckmesser: “Heimlich mir graut, weil es hier munter will hergeh’n:” (I secretly grow afraid, because things are going to get merry here).
Original: “die Frucht so hold und wert, vom Lebensbaum” (the fruit, so fair and precious, from the tree of life).
Beckmesse: “wie Frucht, so Holz und Pferd, vom Leberbaum” (like fruit, as wood and horse, from the tree of liver).
An Arabic joke (as imparted to me by a Syrian, if you must know) I heard involves an airplane full of rowdy schoolchildren. The noise is so bad that the pilot can barely fly the plane so he tells his copilot, “Askuthum (shut them up!)” Copilot disappears for a few minutes, everything goes quiet and the copilot returns & sits down. “That’s much better,” says the pilot. “What did you do to quiet them?” Copilot says, “Asquthum (dropped them out.)”
A Japanese one, which involves a borrowing from English: “39” is often written to mean “thank you”, because in Japanese 3 is “san” and 9 is “kyuu”, so together they are “sankyuu”, which is the Japanese way of saying the English “thank you”. (Japanese convert the English “th” into “s” or “z”, because their language has no “th” sound).
I recently got a brochure on environmentalism entitled “Fermés… ou verts?” (Closed… [or green/open]?)
In a recent election, the Bloc Québécois’s slogan was “Un parti propre au Québec,” which can translate as “A party of Quebec’s own” or “A clean party in Quebec” (playing off a scandal in the Liberal Party.)
In Italian, year is “anno”, anus is “ano”. The “n” is elongated in the first. So Italians use this to make fun of unsuspecting tourists who think they speak Italian, but don’t:
Quanti anni hai? (How many years do you have?)
Ho venti ani. (I have twenty anuses.)
A similar snicker often occurs when English speakers try to order penne pasta (“pene” is penis).
The first joke in Japanese I ever got completely on my own was a wacky mixup plot on Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl confusing otenki, weather, with obenki, urinal.
Lewis Carroll’s puns in the Alice books don’t translate well into French.
*"When we were little,’ the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, ‘we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle–we used to call him Tortoise–’
‘Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?’ Alice asked.
‘We called him Tortoise because he taught us’." *
In Henri Bué 's French translation:
*“La maitresse etait une vieille tortue; nous l’appelions chelonee.”
“Et pourquoi l’appeliez-vous chelonee, si ce n’etait pas son nom?”
“Parcequ’on ne pouvait s’empecher de s’ecrier en la voyant: Quel long nez!” *
The tortured pun of tortoise/taught us has become a remark about a long nose.
