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Language-based humor | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 1 of 12 20 June 2009 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Today, I read a lot about "Contrepèteries" (spoonerisms), a form of word-play in which a permutation of sounds yields a new (and usually vulgar) meaning. It's a rather French discipline, although there exist some examples in other languages, e.g. dear old queen The tradition has it that the solution of such a word-play should never be explicitly given. In French there are thousands of contrepèteries and there's a well-known section in "Le canard enchaîné", in which new contrepèteries are published every week. One of my favorites is "Il est arrivé à pied par la Chine".
Reading about this subject I realized how uncommon this type of word-play is in other languages I know. The Italian wikipedia writes that this kind of pun is much easier in French than Italian, so I was wondering: Are certain languages better suited for (certain types of) word-play? Do you know traditions of language-based humor/word-play proper to certain languages? In general, in which languages is word-play most common? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 12 20 June 2009 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kentucky fried chicken.
Are there more rhyme pairs in French than in Italian? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 12 20 June 2009 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There's a drinking game in English where you have to say "fuzzy duck" and "ducky fuzz". If you spoonerise them, you have to drink.
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| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 4 of 12 20 June 2009 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've got a book by Joel Martin, "La bible du contrepet", which contains 20000 of them! Of course, it's impossible to know how many are theoretically possible in a given language, but I'm not aware of a language with as rich a tradition in inventing spoonerisms as French. Here's a short excerpt from the cited work, a fictional encyclopedia entry for a well-known tennis player:
This short text contains no less than 10 contrepèteries and the result is a surprisingly coherent but terribly indecent story. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dark_Sunshine Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5767 days ago 340 posts - 357 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 5 of 12 21 June 2009 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sadly, this thread has shown me that my French still has a long way to go as I can't tell which words are supposed to 'spoonerised'. And I hate to be left out of a joke
:-( 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kubelek Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal Joined 6854 days ago 415 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 6 of 12 21 June 2009 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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tennis for example :)
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| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 8 of 12 21 June 2009 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's better the other way round... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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