{"id":841,"date":"2009-01-07T09:19:48","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T08:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=841"},"modified":"2009-01-07T09:19:48","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T08:19:48","slug":"cross-lingual-puns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=841","title":{"rendered":"Cross-lingual puns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Today we have a guest post from Sol Klein:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>While not paying in Latin class recently, I started thinking about a phrase I used to hear a lot of back in elementary school, when half of my educational day was conducted in Hebrew and half in English. The phrase is:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u05db\u05d9 \u05e4\u05ea\u05d7 \u05d3\u05dc\u05ea. \u05dc\u05d0 \u05e4\u05ea\u05d7 \u05ea\u05e9\u05d5\u05d1\u05d4\u201d, which translates word-for-word to \u201d \u2018because\u2019 opens door. Does not open answer,\u201d and more loosely translated means \u201cthe word \u2018because\u2019 opens a door. It does not open an answer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Which is of course nonsense when translated literally. The phrase, however, is a pun, and works on the assumption that the audience speaks both English and Hebrew. The word for \u201cbecause\u201d in Hebrew is the first word in the sentence, \u201c\u05db\u05d9,\u201d pronounced \/ki\/, homophonically identical to English \u201ckey.\u201d Taking this pun into account, the phrase can be translated in two different ways: \u201cA key opens a door. It does not open an answer,\u201d or \u201cthe word \u2018because\u2019 opens a door. It does not open an answer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This phrase was used to scold us for not answering \u201cwhy\u201d questions in complete sentences. For example, if we were asked \u201c\u05dc\u05de\u05d4 \u05d4\u05d0\u05d9\u05e9 \u05e9\u05de\u05d7,\u201d \u201cwhy is the man happy,\u201d we would be expected to reply with \u201c\u05d4\u05d0\u05d9\u05e9 \u05e9\u05de\u05d7 \u05db\u05d9 \u05d4\u05d5\u05d0 \u05d0\u05d5\u05db\u05dc \u05d2\u05dc\u05d9\u05d3\u05d4,\u201d \u201cthe man is happy because he is eating ice cream,\u201d rather than simply \u201c\u05db\u05d9 \u05d4\u05d5\u05d0 \u05d0\u05d5\u05db\u05dc \u05d2\u05dc\u05d9\u05d3\u05d4,\u201d \u201cbecause he is eating ice cream.\u201d If we answer in the lazy latter fashion, we begin our answer with \u201c\u05db\u05d9,\u201d \/ki\/, \u201cbecause,\u201d making our answer not a complete sentence. Thus our teacher would say to us \u201c(\u2019\u05db\u05d9,\u2019 \/ki\/, or \u2018key\u2019) opens a door, not an answer,\u201d and we would groan and rephrase our answer in a complete sentence.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I hope I\u2019ve explained this at least somewhat clearly. I realize it would make infinitely more sense to a Hebrew speaker. My question is if you or any of your readers know of any other similar \u201ccross-lingual\u201d puns, where the funny bit depends on an audience\u2019s knowledge of two separate languages, particularly two languages as distinct as English and Hebrew. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today we have a guest post from Sol Klein: While not paying in Latin class recently, I started thinking about a phrase I used to hear a lot of back in elementary school, when half of my educational day was conducted in Hebrew and half in English. The phrase is: \u201c\u05db\u05d9 \u05e4\u05ea\u05d7 \u05d3\u05dc\u05ea. \u05dc\u05d0 \u05e4\u05ea\u05d7 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hebrew","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}