Can your language come out and play?

June 2, 2007 10:06 AM

Do puns exist in every language?

Do some languages make puns easier or more difficult? Are the types of puns very different from one language to the next, thus affecting the sense of humor of those who are fluent in the language?

posted by jknecht to writing & language (27 comments total)

It's theoretically easier in Japanese and Chinese, with their multitude of homophones.

My first pun in Japanese: "一石二兆", describing the airport-island in Osaka Bay that cost 二兆 (two cho) yen, ¥20 trillion or thereabout).
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 10:22 AM on June 2, 2007

The idea that "the language we use constrains the thoughts we think" is in disrepute. Which is to say that I don't think that the characteristics of a language affect the sense of humor of speakers of that language, as such. (Jokes do vary by culture, but the technical aspects of the native language are probably not a significant reason for that.)

I suspect you'll find that nearly all languages permit puns.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:25 AM on June 2, 2007

I'm not sure if any one person is qualified to answer this question, but I think it is safe to assume that puns, at least in some form of word play, exist in every language. However, if you have a certain "category" of pun in mind, this may not be as true.
posted by mateuslee at 10:28 AM on June 2, 2007

Written Japanese is actually very resistant to puns because of the use of kanji. That's exactly why they use kanji; Japanese written in pure hiragana is highly ambiguous and reading it is a massive struggle (especially since they don't mark off word boundaries).

In places where the same hiragana sequence could be read two or more ways which might be relevant, they use kanji to resolve the ambiguity. So if you want to preserve that ambiguity for purposes of humor, you'd want to use hiragana (or katakana) instead of kanji for the critical words.

But in that case it would be obvious where you were trying to be funny, sort of like underlining the punning word in an English joke.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:29 AM on June 2, 2007

You might be interested in a recent article in the New Yorker about the language of a tribe of Amazonian indigenous people -- their tongue lacks many of the once-thought-fundamental features of a language, including numbers, tenses and such.
posted by docgonzo at 10:29 AM on June 2, 2007

You're going to find a lot more variability culturally and interpersonally than you are between languages themselves when it comes to humor. Every person is physiologically able to laugh--however, the "sense of humor" is going to come more from the individual and what they find funny, then what their particular culture has deemed funny--not so explicitly from the way the language itself formulates a joke. Of course the types of puns and other humor are going to be very different depending on where you are in the world, but this draws upon many variables besides the structure of the language. Puns will look different in a language with different syntax/grammar/lexicon because of how they are actually transmitted, and certain types of word humor may be possible in a certain language because of the way it is structured.

Humor is one of the deepest complexities of language, and it takes a good deal of mastery before the subtleties can be fully appreciated. Even a fluent speaker may not fully appreciate the humor capabilities in his or her language. Thus it is not entirely helpful to say anything about "easy" or "more difficult" humor based on the language community of the speaker only--we must take into account who that speaker is, how comfortable he is with the language, what he finds funny, what situation he is in... et cetera.
posted by rhoticity at 10:29 AM on June 2, 2007

Yes, written puns may be harder to convey in extremely isolative languages (Chinese/Japanese) and agglutinative ones (Aymara, Quechua). I suspect that you'll find more written puns in those languages which lay in the middle of the spectrum - but this is only for written puns - I doubt this holds for spoken ones.
posted by mateuslee at 10:31 AM on June 2, 2007

That New Yorker article on Pirahã can be found here, though you may need an academic affiliation to use the database.

Be aware that, being a non-linguistic source, it is... well, journalism. (Also, Everett's original article was published in Current Anthropology, not Cultural, as the article states--if you're up for that, I'd recommend reading it.)
posted by rhoticity at 10:34 AM on June 2, 2007

Written puns in Chinese are an even worse problem. Written Chinese isn't pronunciation-specific; the symbols represent concepts. Everyone in China uses the same written form, but the different dialects as spoken approach mutual incomprehensibility. The exact same hansi character can be pronounced in entirely different ways in Shanghai, in Taiwan, in Beijing, or in Hong Kong, which means that what might be a pun in Mandarin might not be in Cantonese or in Min.

It's true that some hansi glyphs have multiple meanings which aren't obviously related, and in principle a written pun could take advantage of that, but I think it would be quite difficult.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:35 AM on June 2, 2007

Re: DocGonzo - not familiar with this article but I suspect it involves some very controversial research of the Pirahã people by Daniel Everett. Controversy aside, numbers (recursive counting) are not a "fundamental" part of language in the same way that the extensive forest-related vocabulary of the Amazonians is not necessary for Indo-European speech to be considered "language". A language is suited for relevant communication and nothing more. As for tense, certainly all languages are capable of separating the past from the future (this is a characteristic of natural language), many just have different ways of doing it (eg Chinese).
posted by mateuslee at 10:36 AM on June 2, 2007

I remember one time seeing an "interview" with a deaf person who was "speaking" in ASL, who showed and explained a pun in sign language. It relied on two different gestures which were very similar.

Needless to say, it didn't literally translate into normal English; the two words in question were entirely different when spelled or spoken.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:39 AM on June 2, 2007

SCDB: ASL is a great language for wordplay, because its vocabulary is very 'loose' - that is, you can often modify one word so that it appears closer to another word. (And some words are close cousins even without modification.)
posted by spaceman_spiff at 10:54 AM on June 2, 2007

Humor is one of the deepest complexities of language, and it takes a good deal of mastery before the subtleties can be fully appreciated.

I've often noticed that a lot of language learners delight in coming up with puns, and are wonderfully amused by the ones they hear and understand, even if (as is often the case) these are really basic jokes that native speakers would only groan at. A friend of mine, working at a restaurant, taught the Tibetan dishwasher the "I one the sandbox, I two the sandbox..." joke. The guy absolutely loved it, and would repeat it every day.
posted by hydrophonic at 10:54 AM on June 2, 2007

Actually, a cursory glance at tw.joke.yahoo.com/ would show that the Chinese also enjoy some just incredibly stupid puns.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:58 AM on June 2, 2007

I've often noticed that a lot of language learners delight in coming up with puns, and are wonderfully amused by the ones they hear and understand, even if (as is often the case) these are really basic jokes that native speakers would only groan at. A friend of mine, working at a restaurant, taught the Tibetan dishwasher the "I one the sandbox, I two the sandbox..." joke. The guy absolutely loved it, and would repeat it every day.

Definitely--it is not as if you wake up one day and all humor makes sense. You said it yourself, though--these are really basic jokes at first. The popsicle-stick type that five-year-olds, still discovering wonders of language, find so amusing. Some puns are pretty complex, even though the ability to make a pun is not a necessary sign of linguistic maturity.
posted by rhoticity at 11:03 AM on June 2, 2007

Spanish has them as well. And every Spanish-speaking country has its own "genre" like Mexico's albures which, in song, are somewhat similar to the double entendre you find in Trinidad's calypsos.
posted by micayetoca at 11:24 AM on June 2, 2007

Polish humor is very punny, to a degree that would be considered excessively dorky in English. I think it's due to the heavy use of declensions that makes it easier to shuffle sentences around and hint at secondary meanings. A lot of jokes my relatives make rely on double entendres that absolutely don't translate.
posted by migurski at 11:53 AM on June 2, 2007

I don't know how well this fits into contemporary linguistic theory (it's been a while), but it was my impression that the sort of verbal slippery-ness required for puns is a distinguishing feature of language.
posted by Gilbert at 12:36 PM on June 2, 2007

You might be interested in a recent article in the New Yorker about the language of a tribe of Amazonian indigenous people -- their tongue lacks many of the once-thought-fundamental features of a language, including numbers, tenses and such.

Chinese doesn't have tenses.
posted by delmoi at 3:46 PM on June 2, 2007

There's a class of verbal witticism in Chinese called 歇后语 (xiēhòuyŭ) which are essentially extended (often ppretty laboured) puns.
To take one of the examples from the Baidu article I linked:
孔夫子搬家——尽是输(书)
Confucius moving house - It's all shū.
This last has a double meaning: "Nothing but books (书)" sounds the same as "Nothing but losing (输)." In usage, you just say the first part, and your listener mentally fills in the rest. "How was your night at the Plum Blossom House of Dice, Third Uncle?" "Like Confucius moving house!" comes his glum reply.
It used to be common as a kind of verbal sparring bordering on insult a bit like the dozens.
Again, pace SCDB above, written puns are common, as many characters do contain a verbal element that guides their pronunciation (very few are pure ideographs), so despite the various Chinese languages that have varied readings for them, those reading will vary within a common framework. There are of course jokes that work better, in say Hokkien than Guanhua.
posted by Abiezer at 5:45 PM on June 2, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

I always thought so, based on early exposure to Asterix.
posted by Phred182 at 5:56 PM on June 2, 2007

“Needless to say, it didn't literally translate into normal English; the two words in question were entirely different when spelled or spoken.”

Just a note: ASL isn't related to English. There is a type of sign which is "signed English"—it's transliterated English using ASL vocabulary.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:57 PM on June 2, 2007

SCDB: ASL is a great language for wordplay, because its vocabulary is very 'loose' - that is, you can often modify one word so that it appears closer to another word. (And some words are close cousins even without modification.)

I love ASL wordplay. In one of my ASL classes, we had to watch this crazy VHS tape about a family going to the grocery store. While in the produce section, the brother starts making fun of his sister by signing the word "melon" on her head--thus, calling her a "melonhead." She wags her finger at him and, in retaliation, the brother signs the word "banana" by peeling her finger instead of his own.

In both cases, the signs--the semantic meanings--of the words remained unchanged. But by moving the location of the signs in a logical way, the actors on the tape made some very silly jokes indeed. I got the giggles watching the siblings interact. My professor just groaned. :)
posted by ElectricBlue at 7:59 PM on June 2, 2007

Finnish doesn't have puns as such as all words are pronounced exactly as spelled. Homophones don't exist. Lots of wordplay though and creative palindromes are a quite popular form of written humour.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:36 AM on June 3, 2007

Homophones don't exist.

How about "homophones are uncommon"? I just opened up my Finnish dictionary and found aika 'time' and aika 'fairly, quite.'

Interesting question; I imagine all languages have the potential for puns, but the habit of exploiting that potential presumably varies widely.
posted by languagehat at 10:32 AM on June 3, 2007

Sure, homophones may be uncommon, but does "Chinese" have tenses? You're missing the low hanging fruit, languagehat.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 10:38 AM on June 3, 2007

Chinese doesn't have tenses, it has aspects. The -le in chi-le fan 'ate rice' indicates not past tense but perfective aspect. (Book: Aspect in Mandarin Chinese; article "Contrasting Aspect and Tense in English and Chinese" [pdf, HTML cache].)
posted by languagehat at 10:55 AM on June 3, 2007