This post is NOT serious
After a fairly traumatic experience on the Someone Kick Me thread where the English Pun was given an excessive airing, the question occurs to me about what form (if any) the pun takes in other languages and cultures.
Iâd be fascinated by any answers especially with examples translated into English.
My wife has nearly cured me of making puns not by laughing, not by groaning but by ignoring. As any fellow offender will appreciate, this is an unbearable âpunishmentâ.
I have always found English to be âpunnierâ than my mother-tongue german, and while I could endlessly quote english examples springing from the genius minds of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, I struggle to come up with decent german examples.
One thing that comes to mind is that for some descriptive words the plural of the noun and the conjugated verb in the 3rd plural are the same word, like when you take the insect âflyâ (Fliege) and the associated verb âto flyâ (fliegen), leading to sentences such as: Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach.
(When flies are flying behind flies, flies are flying after flies)
There are literally dozens of other words following that same pattern, leading to sentences of varying degrees of sanity.
Which is a lttle bit less of a detailed explanation of the one I heard on R4 a few years ago, but gives the idea of why.
Any similar examples in Welsh?
A bilingual street sign that I passed today read:
Heol y gât / Gate Road.
Taking the liberty of using the Roman for Gate = Road, then we have:
Road Road / Road Road
Various sources point out that any sentence of n x buffalo is grammatical, for n > 0. What I liked - but that has since been removed from the Wikipedia page and is mentioned only on the related âTalkâ page - was the understated explanation of this constraint: âRational sentences, however, generally include at least one word.â
My son learned the Buffalo example when he was going out with an actual âBuffalo Galâ who also gave us a long phrase which sounded to my British ears like âmerry, merry, merry âŚâ. I think variations of âmerry, Mary, marry âŚâ were involved.
I canât think of any Welsh examples but we have, in English:
âI think that that that that that man usedâ or -
âJohn, in the sentence which had had had had had had had had had had the preferenceâ
Thank you all for enriching (?) my life
Weâve had Welsh, German and English and Iâm aware that les calembours / jeux de mots exist in French because of the magnificent Asterix stories but how about Dutch @louis, or Slovenian @tatjana, or Finnish or ⌠?
Can I narrow the definition to this:- âA joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.â while accepting that other definitions exist?
My grandfather teased us with this riddle:
âIk heb vijf vingers aan iedere hand vijf en twintig aan handen en voetenâ
and also this one:
âAmsterdam die grote stad met hoeveel letters schrijft men dat?â
Iâve always known how close English is to Dutch, Friesich, Old Norse etc but it fascinated me that I could understand both your riddles without looking anything up.
We do the âhow many letters in that?â one here too (as you probably know)
We also do âA ship came into the harbour, what (Watt) was the name of the captainâ which loses its point if you write it, of course.
