Linguistic humour (particularly puns) in languages other than English.

Next time you’re in the Czech Republic and your host raises a glass and says “na zdravi!” meaning “to your health!,” reply “nádraží!” (pronounced na-dra-zhi), meaning “train station!”

One of Hitler’s men (I can’t remember if it was Goering or Goebbels) had married a younger wife, but he was reputedly sterile or impotent. They had a son, which prompted Fink’s joke: “I hear X is going to name his son Hamlet. Why? Sein oder nicht sein, das ist der frage!” That’s the first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy, but “Sein” in German can be either “to be” or “his”.

The OP probably knows this one: the solution of a mystery in Asimov’s story “The Key” involves a pun spanning English, German, and Latin.

I’m keeping this short, so it’s a bit disjointed. A person had written a cryptic message which he said was “the key” to where an alien mind-expander was located. The person was soon found dead with his apparent attacker, also dead. Wendell Urth, knowing the message was “the key”, figured out it was the only clue. “Key” in Latin is “clavis”. “Clavis” sounds like “Clavius”, a crater on the Moon. It was named for the German Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius, “Clavius” being the Latinized version of his given name, “Klau”. That sounds like “clue”. The alien object was located near the crater Clavius.

Best laugh I’ve had all week.

In the same vein to rowrrbazzle’s translation pun there is the story that the car manufacturer “Horch” was deliberating as to how to name their new automobile. Since his son was just doing his Latin homework, he suggested translating their last name (which means “listen”) - to the Latin “Audi”.

And on the naming of vehicles, tandem is Latin for “at length”, which is what a tandem bicycle literally is.

This segues nicely into Subbuteo, the name of a table football game that was quite the thing a generation ago (I’ve no idea how it’s doing these days). subbuteo is the Latin name for the hobby hawk, so “subbuteo” = “hobby” = “pastime”. :slight_smile:

Ok, so this isn’t exactly what this thread is about, but I’ll tell it anyway, because I think its funny, and it make it makes us Swedes look like morons.

You know that joke that goes something like “two tomatoes are crossing a road, one gets run over by a car, and so is smashed, so the other tomato turns to him and says “hey, catch up!””
Now this is probably only funny for younger kids, but the whole joke is, of course, that “catch up!” sounds a lot like “ketchup!”.
In swedish, however, the two phrases don’t sound similar at all, so the last line of the joke has become :“hey, come on ketchup, lets go!”, totally removing the whole point of the joke… :smack: :smiley:

For bilingual linguistic fun, see if you can find Mots d’heure: gousse, rames, a whole book of (admittedly tortured) French poems which when recited aloud, are English nursery rhymes (with a noticable French accent).