The humour of similar-sounding words

[Skomakar'n]

I'm in a childish mood today, so I'm starting this topic. The point of it is to either take words or expressions that sound similar and make up an entertaining pair, or words or expressions that contain similar-sounding cognates but with different meanings, or just translate directly even with no audible similarity, if that also ends up in an amusing result.

Some examples to start this off, with Swedish and English pairs:

skitsnack - shit(e) snack (actually meaning 'bullshit')
strike while the iron is hot - stryk medan järnet är hett (actually meaning 'iron [the clothes] while the iron is hot'; 'strike' and 'stryka' are cognates)
skitgod - shit(e) good (actually 'really good', with 'shit(e)' as an emphasising prefix)

I come up with these fairly often, but I can't remember any more right now, but now that the thread is here, I can post them the next time I do.

[Astraios]

Barbie (in non-rhotic English) and Ken sound like the Hebrew for "come in me" (/ba bi/) and "yes" (/ken/).

[Timmytiptoe]

Strijk als het ijzer heet is, means something close to the Swedish, actually.

There is a Dutch joke, in which a minister visits England. He gets asked if he has any hobbies.
He says: "Yes, I fok horses." (fokken = to breed)
The shocked host exclaims: "Pardon?!"
The minister replies: "Ja, paarden!" (paarden = horses)

It might only be funny if you speak both languages.

[Shrdlu]

Swedish skjuta means both shoot, push and care.
There's this joke about an almost deaf man who tries to kill himself, fails, and gets sent to psycologist who ends with telling him that "Nu tycker jag att du ska gå hem och sköta(take care of your self in a better way) om dig på ett bättre sätt" which he hears as "Nu tycker jag att du ska gå hem och skjuta(shoot yourself in a better way) om dig på ett bättre sätt.

edit(not really ontopic):
Smart arab(same meaning in both languages) backwards. in Swedish, is "bara trams" which translates to "just bullshit"
Muslim is "mouse-glue", whatever that is.
And "Alla" just means "all".

[Rui]

Barbie (in non-rhotic English) and Ken sound like the Hebrew for "come in me" (/ba bi/) and "yes" (/ken/).

I actually laughed out loud when I read that.

As for on-topicness, the Chinese word(s) for "don't have to" are 不必 bú bì

[Skomakar'n]

Swedish skjuta means care.

wat

sköta which he hears as skjuta

wat (aren't you invalidating your first statement by saying this, by the way?)

(shoot yourself in a better way)

wat

You're not a native, speaker are you? If you are, then you sure speak some weird dialect... 'skjuta' does not mean 'care' ('sköta' does, which you pointed out yourself, and you specifically said that the patient misheard one as the other – I guess there might be some dialect(s) in which they are pronounced the same, but this would be neither standard nor common [on the other hand, both people from Gothenburg and Stockholm are very fond of pronouncing short ö as short u]), and 'skjuta om sig' doesn't mean anything or make much sense at all. It could possibly be used as 'close (the doors or whatever) around oneself' if the first word is stressed, if we use it in the sense of 'push' that you listed as a possible translation, which is indeed correct (since something like 'skjuta igen dörren' could work, but since 'igen' is not used here, it still doesn't work out that well), if we are taking it really far, but it's probably not entirely correct and I think very specific context would be required for a native speaker to interpret is as that.

(don't interpret the lack of smilies as anger, by the way; I'm just trying to enlighten you with my point of view, if that could be of any help)

[Shrdlu]

Native speaker, and I made a few brainfarts. As you pointed you, and I was going to add that "skjuta(shoot) is similar to sköta(care)", but that somehow slipped my mind.
"Skjuta om sig" means exactly what it means, to shoot one self again, and it is an perfectly natural sentence for me and I don't understand why it wouldn't be so.

(And yeah, I pronounce short ö as ö)

[Skomakar'n]

Native speaker, and I made a few brainfarts. As you pointed you, and I was going to add that "skjuta(shoot) is similar to sköta(care)", but that somehow slipped my mind.
"Skjuta om sig" means exactly what it means, to shoot one self again, and it is an perfectly natural sentence for me and I don't understand whuy it wouldn't be so.

(And yeah, I pronounce short ö as ö)

Oooh! Haha. Yeah. That's actually true. That wouldn't be my first interpretation. I kind of suspected, that if you were indeed a native speaker, you'd probably correct me and make me look like derp anyway, but that was also worth the shot.

You are completely right and I stand corrected. It was a bit pushed to the very far edges, though, and I don't think I would have found such a joke very funny (particularly because I would hear the difference very clearly myself :/), heh.

Aw. I hate the feeling when I have to explain a joke. Sorry for my stupidity forcing you to that. At least I was right about one thing, so we're even, eh? e;
I did really think it through for a while, though, and I didn't realise that it could be interpreted like this. Not a very common thing to say. I'm a lousy wordsmith.

[----]

Polish być 'to be' is always a fun one. Pronounced [bɨt͡ɕ].

[MisterBernie]

What, no megapussi and minipussi yet?

And speaking of that,

[Rui]

What, no megapussi and minipussi yet?

Reminds me of Bimbo

[Skomakar'n]

One from the newspaper today:

räkefiske ('shrimp fishing') - reek fish(ing) (a reeking fish in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess)

[Ulrike Meinhof]

räkefiske

Which paper was that? (I'd expect räkfiske in Standard Swedish)

[Ziz]

What, no megapussi and minipussi yet?

Reminds me of Bimbo

Haha! On the bread here, they put a pronunciation guide on the plasticky wrapper thing.

@Astraios: Could בא בי be used as equivalent to, like... תזיין אותי?

[Cathbad]

The word for Japanese in Arabic, يبني، /jabani:/ [jEbEni], sounds exactly the same as "fucking" (adj., as in "that fucking guy") in Slovene/Serbian/what have you. (This was an in-joke between me and my first-undergrad-year Arabic teacher, whose wife was from Bosnia.)

[Jashan]

Here's another Dutch/English bilingual joke:

Q: Hoe zeg je ''klitoris' in het Engels? ("How do you say 'clitoris' in English?")
A: Shakespeare! ('speare' sounds identical the Dutch spier, meaning muscle... so... a muscle that makes a girl shake)


And while these aren't really humorous just because, they caused me no end of trouble when I was learning Dutch (and sometimes still do):

huren [hyr@n] vs hoeren [hur@n]
'to rent' vs. 'prostitutes'

Ja, ik zoek een apartment om te hoeren....
'Yes, I'm looking for an apartment to whore out.'


lol [lɔl] vs. lul [lʌl]
'fun' vs. 'dick'

Ik deed het gewoon voor de lul
"I just did it for the dick."

And this one made me giggle when I heard it on a movie:

Dit is een bibliotheek, hoor!
'Hey, this is a library!'

But hoor sounds almost identical to English whore, so I kept thinking the librarian was so mad that they were being noisy that she said, "This is a library, you whore!"

[MisterBernie]

Ik deed het gewoon voor de lul

...*writes that down*

[Mr. Z]

What, no megapussi and minipussi yet?

Reminds me of Bimbo

Haha! On the bread here, they put a pronunciation guide on the plasticky wrapper thing.

@Astraios: Could בא בי be used as equivalent to, like... תזיין אותי?

Pretty much... only בא is third person past tense.

[Astraios]

Pretty much... only בא is third person past tense.

Or present.

[Mr. Z]

Pretty much... only בא is third person past tense.

Or present.

Right. It's still not 2nd person, though.

[Astraios]

Right. It's still not 2nd person, though.

In the present?

[Timmytiptoe]

lol [lɔl] vs. lul [lʌl]

The vowel in lul is rounded and more central than ʌ, it sounds to me like somewhere between ʏ and œ (I prefer to write ʏ because of the symmetry). Also, /l/ is realized as [ɫ] after a vowel, so it's [lɔɫ] vs. [lʏɫ]

Anyway, some more false friends in Dutch.

pet means hat.
Take your pet from your head!

The word for toaster is broodrooster
Is there a bread rooster in the breakfast room?

in de war zijn - to be confused, to be disorganized
My hair is in the war.

[Jashan]

lol [lɔl] vs. lul [lʌl]

The vowel in lul is rounded and more central than ʌ, it sounds to me like somewhere between ʏ and œ (I prefer to write ʏ because of the symmetry). Also, /l/ is realized as [ɫ] after a vowel, so it's [lɔɫ] vs. [lʏɫ]

True, I was being lazy with my transcription.

This probably doesn't count, but Dutch also has a load of idioms that sound absolutely ridiculous when you translate them directly. My favorite one: "X with hair on it." == "rusty, out of practice". Which leads to people making comments about how you should "shave your English" or such. (I can't remember if the 'shaving' comments were made while speaking Dutch - Je moet je Engels dan scheren! - or in English though.)

Oh, and one more false friend: pot Dutch: "dyke" (as in, lesbian) English: "vessel for cooking food"

This also leads to the humorous play on words pottenkast: either 'a place where you keep cookware' or 'the closet' (as in gay people 'come out of the closet')

I've also seen this further extended with the resemblance between pottenkast [pɔtəkɑst] with podcast [pɔdkæst], for a lesbian-themed podcast on iTunes.

[Skomakar'n]

räkefiske

Which paper was that? (I'd expect räkfiske in Standard Swedish)

Oh, yeah. I went back to check, and that's actually what it said. Oops. All the more fun, then! Closer to the English thing.

[TomHChappell]

Somebody needs to mention "un petit d'un petit, s'etonnent aux Halles" here.