I guess everybody knows that, in Chinese, inflection is the most important part of the semantic system. But the whole exercise led me (back) to one of my "dichos" (Scroll down along the right-hand margin) quoted in the Hed above. It got me thinking, anecdotally:
Puns are demonstrations of fluency.Any ideas? This is something that interests me considerably. I used to know somebody with whom I could discuss it, but she's gone. So feed me back, sil vous plais?
Puns usually suffer in translation.
There's no such thing as an 'outside' joke.
Posted by woody on Mon 16 Mar 2009 at 07:52 PM
my favorite clean pun:
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Can it be 'translated' in a way that makes one both laugh and think, simultaneously? Can there b e a 'literal translation' of a pun that retains the thing for which we appreciate puns, to the (greater or lesser) extent that we do: the anarchy of it??
1 comment:
No.
heh
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