zompist bboard

Every now and then you come up with a phrase or word in one language that sounds utterly ridiculous in another. Unconsciously as conlangers we may try to avoid these (I'm sure everyone has giggled at least once at the frequency and inbocuousness of "shit" in Japanese) but a few generally still get through. So! What've you found?

Lilitika has one I'm fairly proud of—"Sofil dhí?" means "Will we fuck?" but sounds almost identical to "so filthy." I also ended up with the verb "natzé," meaning "to disturb nature."

In Ahu, the word for the god of a monotheistic religion is fak.

This is claimed to be a misprint by ticketing system, but I suspect it's a photoshop:



Titit means peepee in Indonesian.

In Himmaswa, Eep men dark bio steak soy choo! means "You soon ought to successfully establish a torch in the public lagoon!" Am I stretching it here? Not really a pun I guess, just a bunch of English-looking words.

I thought you'd start about jokes that only work using two different languages:

Two people from Nijmegen stay in an English B&B and wonder what they get for breakfast. One of them goes to ask about this, and upon returning asks: Do you know what they said what we'd get for breakfast? hæmənɛks
hæmənɛks ~ 'ham and eggs' in English, but 'nothing at all' in the Nijmegen dialect of Dutch. (note that Dutch people generally don't percieve the voiced/voiceless distinction in codas.)

An Englishman is driving through the Groningen province in the Netherlands. At one point he looses control over his car, and hits a chicken coop. An agitated farmer appears, and the Englishman tries to calm him: kiːp kwaiət, kiːp kwaiət. To which the farmer responds: kɪp kʋait, kɪp kʋait, bɪn ʋɛl tin kipm̩ kʋait (lost a chicken? lost a chicken? I lost at least ten of them). (At least to a speaker of standard Dutch with enough understanding of this dialect, these two sound similar enough for the joke to work)

If you know both languages, and the narrator does well, these can be really funny.

Grunnen wrote:hæmənɛks ~ ham and eggs in English, but nothing at all in the Nijmegen dialect of Dutch.

So ... why is that funny? Or do you mean it means 'nothing at all'.

Do you know the one about fokking horses?

Imralu wrote:

Grunnen wrote:hæmənɛks ~ ham and eggs in English, but nothing at all in the Nijmegen dialect of Dutch.

So ... why is that funny? Or do you mean it means 'nothing at all'.

Do you know the one about fokking horses?

It does indeed mean they now expect not to get breakfast (changed the original to reflect this). I do know the one about fokking horses, didn't think of it. It's a good one though.

Imralu wrote:

Grunnen wrote:hæmənɛks ~ ham and eggs in English, but nothing at all in the Nijmegen dialect of Dutch.

So ... why is that funny? Or do you mean it means 'nothing at all'.

I would guess the German cognates would be "haben wir nichts", which can also get reduced to something like "hammer nix" in some dialects which sounds very similar to [hæmənɛks]

Not really a pun, but there was a bilingual billboard for a new McDonald's berry-flavored smoothie in my old neighborhood that said "berry rico," which you wouldn't understand if you weren't bilingual (at least to some extent). There are quite a few bilingual ads around LA; I should try to make a note of others.

The word for 'run' in Nahakhontl is zum.

Bad one in Irish
Pronounced similarly to "Please" (Más é do thoil é).

The infamous school French joke of the French and English cats called, "Un deux trois" and "One two three" respectively who have a swimming race. The English cat wins, because Un Deux Trois Cat Sank.

There's a clothing store in Southern Ontario called "Jean Machine" but this means "hives" (the skin rash) in Japanese (蕁麻疹 jinmashin).