Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by alphydan | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

alphydan

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.

View on HN

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).

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

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'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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com