I study poetry and language in my language (portuguese), and, well, I’d like to make a question that may be kinda weird, but I’d like to try.
There are these 2 types of language: the ones who focus on a single radical plus prefixes and sufixes, like indo-european languages (latin, french, italian, portuguese; russian, servian etc.), and there are those who combine radicals (asian languages). Somehow german is somewhere between them, but never mind that one.
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When we are alphabetized in the first one, we learn the sounds of letters, then the syllables, then words. A higher language education includes realizing how the **sounds** themselves suggests ideas. For instance, many of our jokes are **sound** **jokes**.
\- what kind of bees make milk? *Boo bees* (boobies)
\- Educated people are hot. Why? Because they have more degress! (hot in the sense of sexy and hot in the sense of temperature)
\- 5 ants rented an apartment with another tenants. Now… they’re TENants!
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I’m heta in japanese, but I think that these type of sound jokes doesn’t quite work, because the words, the sino-japanese words, are compounded in a more specific way, right? I mean, you put two kanji together that specify hot + temperature, or the kanji makes it clear and breaks the double entendre.
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Or does it? I know this literally break the joke lol
but could you guys explain me something about japanese (or chinese) humour? Does this sound jokes happen? Are they often?
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I made this first explanation because although japanese have the kanas, it feels, for a foreigner, that you guys rely more on the radical ideas than on the component sounds. If that’s so, that would be a pretty interesting topic for me to investigate. I’m dead curious about languages and cultures.
Sorry if it was too detailed. But thanks for the patience.
2 comments
…Do you mean puns?
Because [ダジャレ](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A7%84%E6%B4%92%E8%90%BD) is a thing and absolutely not rare at all.
Puns are only based on sounds being similar. There’s no requirement for the written language to be written in alphabet form (no-one actually *speaks* in kanji, after all).
If anything, the more restrictive set of syllables (and resulting abundance of homophones) creates *more* opportunities for puns than are present in European languages.
I would say that Japanese actually combines it. Majority of puns are based on sounds, but I’ve seen puns based on kanji too. Japanese words have more variety. In our mind we have a very complex system, it’s not a simple “pronunciation-meaning” pair, but also a huge amount of more indirect information. We have ability to recognize text without reading each letter/syllable, and when we talk about “to eat”, it’s associated with nouns like rice, fruits, meat, partially with nouns like car as “eat in the car”, but not so much with “metal”, unless we start to form even more indirect connections like “eat-spoon-metal”. We know some stories related to eating, we have some emotions, preferences, attitude towards it and so on. Japanese simply adds another layer, because now vocabulary also has associations via kanji.
From my personal experience Japanese has even more puns with a higher variety how it can be made.