Why English is such a great language for puns | Hacker News Reader

Why English is such a great language for puns

economist.com

103 pointssohkamyung76 comments

Vietnamese humour is remarkably focused around puns and other word-play, much more so than American humour. The reason is presumably because Vietnamese has a ton of homophones, and even more words that differ by only one vowel or tone.

(this makes learning Vietnamese a kind of trying experience, as every mispronunciation is a source of hilarity for native speakers :) )

Not only Vietnamese but a lot of languages all over the world, if not most or all. Puns and wordplay exist in any language, and people who say "why English/German/Swahili/whatever is so great for Y" merely have no deeper understanding of linguistics aside folk etymologies and lists of "untranslated words" (which are a joke to people actually into linguistics) and things like that.

Japanese comedians can't go 10 minutes without making a pun, and a lay person could strongly agree that it is the language that uses them the most due to all common similar-sounding words, frequent games with kanji and their different meanings etc. It's common for even business names to be puns in Japan.

Examples please. I love puns.

There is a sushi shop near me called "Sushi Yah!" the japanese for "sushi shop" is "すし屋" pronounced "sushi ya"

There's a sushi restaurant near me called "SushiMe," a pun of "sashimi" I've always assumed.

I have a real groaner that I heard from a friend.

You have a carrot, and put it in a pot. You have a tomato, and put it in a pot. You have a potato, and put it in a pot. What's in the pot?

三つ野菜だ。"Three vegetables." It sounds like "Mitsuya Cider," a brand of soda.

Japanese humor consists almost entirely of puns. I still remember the first joke I understood on a comedy show on Japanese TV:

Tired salaryman comes from after a long day at work, strips off clothes. His wife has prepared a hot bath, so he enters, pulls out a tub of kimchi (Jp. kimuchi) and blissfully exhales aah, kimochi ii ("feels good").

Lots more here:

https://everything2.com/title/Japanese+puns+that+are+not+fun...

I don't know if I would generalize based on the prevalence of any particular style of humor on popular TV. Or I might think that English humor consists almost entirely of absurdist satire.

I recall a joke that went something like this:

マイケル・ジャクソンの好きな色は何ですか?　青！

Michael Jackson no sukina iro wa nan desu ka? AO!

It means: What's Michael Jackson's favorite color? BLUE! (You are supposed to shout the "ao!" in a Jackson-like falsetto.)

Anime and manga are LOADED with puns. For example the Saiyans in Dragon Ball are called such because saiya is a reversal of yasai (野菜, "vegetable"). Which explains why they have names like Kakarott, Raditz, Vegeta, and so forth.

Not a typical Japanese pun, I suppose, but a pun story I heard:

There was a Korean guy working in a Japanese company.

One day, his coworker went out to the roof for a quick cigarette break. Another person came in and asked where he was, so the Korean guy would reply (in Japanese), "Oh, Mr. Tanaka is taking a break, on top of the roof."

The person blushes, and leaves wordlessly. The Korean guy is confused, and then realizes he used the Korean word for the roof: "oksang".

(Japanese okusan = wife)

As an Italian native speaker I wholeheartedly agree. It's one of the reasons I love English more.

Not only does English have many more homophones, and nouns can be used as verbs and vice versa, but English also has a much higher “word density” (for lack of a better term). The vocabulary is larger, and words tend to be shorter. The combination of the two means that you can take any short word, and odds are many other words with completely different meanings are just one letter-change away. On top of that, pronunciation is very inexact, which means many vowels and consonants sound alike.

These things make English pretty bad for oral comprehension, but great for puns.

> Why English is such a great language for puns

Because one doesn't know other languages :-)

I know a guy who generates them constantly, in Russian. I even started wondering why Russian is so great language for puns?

The article provides no evidence about why English, specifically, is great for puns.

>> . It has a large vocabulary and a rich stock of homophones from which puns can be made

Ok. What about the other 6000 languages? Do they have more/less homophones. French sure has a ton of them.

>> It is constantly evolving, with new words being invented and old ones given fresh meanings

Yes, like any other language.

>> And it is mostly uninflected, allowing for verbs and nouns to switch places

Good. But other languages, like German, can keep the suspense until the end of the sentence (where the verb is located), ending the sentence in an unexpected twist. So is this a distinct advantage? Is it so unique?

>> it has no gendered nouns

You would think languages with lots of declinations allow for smart puns too, right?

It seems it has been written by an English speaker with little knowledge of any other language.

Chinese also is a great language for puns. I was in Taipei a few weeks ago and saw a restaurant named 糖朝 (tangchao, Sugar Dynasty), when most people would expect to see 唐朝 (tangchao, Tang Dynasty).

In addition, many cultural sayings are based off "puns." For example, 年年有餘 (nian nian you yu, year after year there will be a surplus) is a common saying during the Chinese New Year. However, many families eat fish (魚, yu, fish) during the Chinese New Year because it sounds like surplus. And so, 年年有餘 is sometimes rendered 年年有魚 (nian nian you yu, year after year there will be fish).

There's an entire type of Chinese comedy which is roughly translatable as homophone puns (相声). Few non native speakers ever get good enough to do it.

In fact when I was watching the CCTV New year broadcast in English 7 or so years back, the translation and subtitles basically just gave up for all of the crosstalk segments. They just put a banner underneath saying basically "this is crosstalk now, sorry we can't translate it because it's too hard".

The one famous non-native xiangsheng master being Dashan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iailMSUVenA

Oh yeah that dude I recognize him, didn't know he could do crosstalk, that's impressive.

I had a conversation with someone in Taipei once, asking them if they had puns in Mandarin, after explaining what's puns were he said "oh no", which mystified me because just about every word has different meanings by changing the tone on the vowel ... When I asked about that it was "oh yes we do that all the time"

Chinese here, I agree that it is very easy to have puns in Chinese. But I don't think Chinese find puns very humorous in general (probably it is too easy?), is it more often used to make blessing or satirical phrases.

Can anyone comment on the suggestion in the article that in China puns may be used to evade censorship.

That would be this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse

I've read about the 10 Mythical Creatures of Baidu[0] a few times, and while my Mandarin is too poor to have gotten any of the jokes without explanation, it seems like it would have been quite funny to run across any in the wild.

[0]: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/baidu-10-mythical-creatures-gr...

The Chinese language great for puns not only because so many characters sound the same, with tons of idioms understood nationwide. Because the language is character based, abbreviations of words are made of full characters and may have their own meanings. As someone graduating from the department of computer science, the most classic joke is to shorten the name of the department into "whorehouse". (计算机学院 ji4 suan4 ji1 xue2 yuan4 => 计院 ji4 yuan4 ~ 妓院 ji4 yuan4)

I think the vocab has a fair amount to do with it - for example I understand English is far broader than Spanish. Don't forget also that our tabloid press are hooked on puns and word play: http://www.shortlist.com/news/the-60-greatest-newspaper-head...

Even governments embrace the pun, I saw this registration plate yesterday - http://www.state.nj.us/mvc/Vehicle/ShoreToPlease.htm

I can't read the article because I'm at my limit for free Economist articles this week.

Does the article assert that English is the only language that is great with puns or is noticeably better than other languages at puns? That's what your points are addressing. The title only implies that English is great for puns, saying nothing about whether or not others are too.

Here's a Google webcache.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

Why suffer? uMatrix + uBlock Origin for the win. I don't see any ads or any ad blocker blockers.

Also to note is pictograph based languages allow for visual puns/jokes.

>You would think languages with lots of declinations allow for smart puns too, right?

The article doesn't try to argue that richer declensions make puns impossible, just that it makes it harder. I would definitely agree with that.

Richer declensions make puns different, not harder. Adding or changing suffix due to declination opens a whole new world of "word collisions" waiting to happen.

I think the headlines are a tradition rather than something else.

Maybe there is also a slight hint of intellectualism or some would say elitism in the references to classical quotes and trivia that's generally only picked up in higher education.

I rather like it though. It's a shame that the headlines in Sweden - where I live - looks more and more as the worst kind of clickbate. Puns are not exactly unknown here - and the dad-joke pun is is even named after the second largest city...

I like reading TE, but articles about countries other than the US or the UK always give me the impression that they simply cannot fathom that people think differently in other cultures.

You’re being charitable- they give the impression that they think those other cultures are wrong

I'd like to see the biggest losers at these punning competitions give a talk at the Pun Ted conference.

I see what you did there

Look, I don't pretend to be an expert here but I've dabbled in learning some other languages, most recently spanish.

One thing that keeps coming up is how economical English seems to be compared to at least the other languages I've encountered. By "economical" I mean in terms of syllables. This seems to be a particularly useful property when it comes rhyming and lyrics and the like.

A few examples from Spanish:

nosotros/nosotras = we

demasiado = too

bastante = quite

primavera = spring

verano = summer

invierno = winter

bebemos = (we) drink

Also, as seems to be common in western European languages (other than English) is that more articles are required. Also, English fits the German pattern (being of that family linguistically speaking, this is unsurprising) of appending nouns together to form new words. In English these are separated by spaces still. In German they are not but it is the same construct/idea.

So English: Independence Day

Spanish: El dia de la independencia

Now this is more complicated because the verb forms in Spanish tend to be so distinct you can drop the subject eg (Yo) estoy tarde (I am late). But still "estoy" is two syllables compared to one in English ("am"). Also, some pronouns are so indistinct that they need to be qualified (eg with "a usted" or "a ella").

I'm by no means a linguistics expert so can't say what affect this has on, say, the speed of information transfer (which I expect is _roughly_ the same across languages but variances probably exist) or on poetry, songs or even puns. But I find it interesting.

Another point: what people find funny, even with those that have the same native tongue, varies culturally. There have been studies on this. For example, Americans tend to prefer humour where people get hurt (ostensibly) and just slapstick in general. This seems to explain things like The Three Stooges. Speaking as an Australian, I've never understood the appeal. But as an Australian, our humour is much closer to English humour.

Again, I make no claims about English compared to other languages.

On the relative density of languages, here's an article about a study I think has been discussed on HN before: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0... Basically your intuition is pretty much correct: languages have roughly the same speed of information transfer because lower density is compensated for with greater speed.

I'm a native English speaker who's passable at Spanish, and I've noticed this as well. One of the ways I try to practice Spanish is by mentally translating the lyrics of (English) songs that I'm listening to, and it's pretty much impossible to fit a direct translation of most lines within the correct number of syllables, so it becomes an exercise in trying to find a way to express the same thing in fewer syllables before the next line of the song comes.

Examples from colloquial French with number of syllables:

on (1) = we (1)

trop (1) = too (1)

assez (2) = quite (1) (this one you could translate a few different ways including plutôt, pas mal, très, etc...)

printemps (2) = spring (1)

été (2) = summer (2)

hiver (2) = winter (2)

on boit (2) = we drink (2) [1]

It's also easy to come up with examples where French requires fewer syllables:

hier (2) = yesterday (3)

demain (2) = tomorrow (3)

on se voit (2, possibly 3 if you enunciate carefully) = we see each other (5)

So I think your examples from Spanish are kinda cherry-picked.

At any rate, I'm not convinced that "number of syllables" is a very useful metric, since English syllables are more complicated and take longer to utter than Spanish ones.

[1]: In the formal/standard register this would be "nous buvons" (3 syllables), but in colloquial speech you would hear "on boit" 99% of the time.

English grammar is too simple :-) Elaborate grammar gives you a lot of substance to play with. I root for German :-)

Because the audience of the Economist is mostly English-speaking and who doesn't like a good ego-stroke, eh?

Yeah, let's start with "why English is such a great language for puns", but then explain that it's not actually going to be about puns at all (an extremely difficult kind of joke to make because real puns are either grammatically incorrect, or nonsense without a strong established context or audience) but simply about any kind of play on words.

I was hoping the comment section would be a bit more witty! Was looking forward to a few groans

Can someone explain the pun in "LIBOR pains"?

Labor pains, I think.

I disagree that puns require exact homophones. Each language (group) has different tools for building puns. English, Chinese, etc. use mostly homophones since they are abundant.

Romance languages, in particular Portuguese and Spanish, and Italian to some extent, use many types of pun-building techniques that do not depend solely on homophones: clever rhymes, heteronyms, homographs and other quasi-homonyms. Having longer words means you can embed and concatenate into portmanteaus and puns. Latin and Greek word root prefix and suffix are also rich and an infinite source of puns.

Portuguese speakers are very found of puns and specially word play. So I think pun is a more of a cultural thing, as noted in this thread by some people, than a language feature.

Here's a few Brazilian "trocadilhos" (puns and word play).

- "Fora Dilma vez!", instead of "fora de uma vez" - meaning "Oust [president] Dilma now".

- "Lula: Presidente da Silva", for "President for sure" where "da Silva" is Lula's last name but also colloquially means "for sure".

- "Filhos da Fruta", fruit shop in São Paulo. Word play with "sons of a bitch/fruit"

- "Rock in Rio", rock festival.

Spanish word play culture goes back centuries. Francisco de Quevedo for instance used this device often in his poems, and word play have been present in popular culture ever since. Here's a sample:

- "El calvario de la alopecia", a title to an article ("the calvary of hair loss"). Word play with "calvo" (bald) and "calvario" (calvary).

- "Digamelón", instead of "Dígamelo" ("hello?") when picking up the phone, a pun meaning "hello you moron".

- "Timofónica", portmanteau of "timo" (scam) and "Telefónica" (phone company).

- "Yo loco, loco, y ella loquita", (I'm crazy, she's crazier) which sounds like "Yo lo coloco, ella lo quita" (I put it in, she takes it out).

- "La Tapilla Sixtina", a tapas bar, word play with "Capilla Sixtina" (Sistine Chapel).

Hopefully that gives an idea of the possibilities that make Romance languages pun rich.

But I have to say the English and Chinese press (and readers presumably) love puns more than anyone else for even serious articles, like the OP mentions. The former gets in trouble sometimes [1], and the latter was even outlawed [2]!

[1] http://www.espn.co.uk/football/uefa-champions-league/story/1...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/28/china-media-wa...

tl;dr Homophones considered charmful

tl;dr English is a punny language

The pun is the lowest form of humor. There is a tendency, especially among educated males of a certain age, to start to feel themselves quite clever. These fellows, in order to demonstrate their cleverness to the world, being to subject their friends and family with an onslaught of puns. If you know such a punner, and you probably do, don't encourage them by saying things like, "I just love how your mind works" or "I never would have thought of that." Such encouragement can lead to years of future punning. These men need your help. I recommend a good hard slap.

To quote a better man than me:

>The assumption that puns are per se contemptible, betrayed by the habit of describing every pun not as a pun, but as a bad pun or a feeble pun, is a sign at once of sheepish docility and desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact. [0]

[0] Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd Edition

Seems Fowler may be missing the point. Many derisive comments are in fact statements of relative approbation. As in: "that pun was not just bad (good), it was awful (great)"

For every foul pun, there is another still Fowler.

Yeah, I agree in part. But many do call all puns bad (bad). The emergence of bad (good) probably followed this.

I also think that the bad-awful spectrum is missing a category: the sublime/artful pun. See Shakespeare:

>Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this Son of York

>Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.

Those who possess the wit but refrain, are the most admirable.

Ha, who said that? Stating your opinion as aphorism doesn't make it true.

The application of wit seems to me to only be a positive. Humor brings joy. Adding wit to a conversation makes it strictly better.

Like good hammers, good wit can be used for evil. After it is how we mock people.

Voltaire, in spite of his other good attributes, was a villain in this regard. He could tell lies about opponents, but he would do it wittily so that the opponents couldn't set the record straight without it seeming that they can't take a joke.

Fowler stated his opinion in his book and you used that as an aphorism. Do you accept that as truth just because you know who said that, but don't even consider something that a pseudonymous user wrote? I have to say that you are a dumb sheep, even though I agree with you in the pun/humor matter.

First off, Fowler's lines aren't an aphorism. If they are, then all quotes are aphorisms. Was it an appeal to authority? Sure. Fowler was a genius. I'll more readily accept his authority than some pseudonymous user's.

Secondly, I did consider our grandparent's comment (see the second half of my reply). Should consideration be measured in word count or something? Should I have written him a paper?

I called him out on the comment because I see such pithy writing as fundamentally intellectually dishonest. Writing your (unsupported) conclusion with the trappings of a well-known adage misrepresents your (possibly personal) opinion as something already widely believed, staving off further argument.

A witty saying proves nothing -Voltaire

> Adding wit to a conversation makes it strictly better.

Clearly there are many exceptions to the above assertion. The most common being when the main purpose of the wit is not to entertain but to showcase the punner's cleverness.

>The most common being when the main purpose of the wit is not to entertain but to showcase the punner's cleverness.

Not to get bogged down by minutiae, but I'd argue that wit and ostentation are two separate things, and that it's certainly possible to practice one without the other.

But sure, I'll concede that some puns are made pretentiously.

You seem bitter and boring, and I would not want to have conversations with someone who is so strict and boring and so set on their own supposed superiority that they shun the pun, to wit.

> There is a tendency, especially among educated males of a certain age, to start to feel themselves quite clever.

Once they learn a bit more, they start in with unintentionally ironic wordcraft on Hacker News.

Sorry, for us in the, um, third tier of humor evolution, that is one of the most cringeworthy sentences imaginable.

I seem to recall that young children of a certain age delight in puns, but eventually grow out of it as they find other parts of life and language more fascinating. Perhaps it would accordingly be apt to tell adult pun-slingers to find more age-appropriate humour, as one might point an adult devotee of nursery-rhymes toward more adult poetry.

Yes, they've surely never heard of other types of humor /s

Repetition is sometimes instructive.

This comment is actually more insightful then I would like to admit. Maybe we should be using forms of repetition more explicitly.

Lower even than the fart joke or the Hollywood classic kick to the crotch?

That's why the worst, most cringeworthy puns are the funniest. Still probably deserve a slap though.

> There is a tendency, especially among educated males of a certain age, to start to feel themselves quite clever.

This is clearly an emotive subject, and when reading this you should always remember to take a breath. Perhaps just before the words "quite clever".

There are different levels of humour? Please humour me.

Baa, Yewe are no fun.

Used in moderation prevents it from being too terrible.

Awesome!

slapchat

That's what she said.

Agreed in spades – consider the rapid and acute decline of Andy Zaltzman, at one time a colossus astride his profession, now alas a gibbering wreck.

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