tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 14 08:06:47 2014
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[Tlhingan-hol] A Challenge to the group
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: [Tlhingan-hol] A Challenge to the group
- Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 11:06:28 -0400
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Okay,
Remember the scene from the first STNG episode where Worf turns to Data and says, "I don't understand their sense of humor, either."?
There's a class of joke that makes no sense in translation, because the funny part is all about the words and their multiple meanings. Danish, as I understand it, has an old joke that they think is hilarious. Forgive my misspelling, but it goes something like, "For for ikke for. For for lam."
The translation is, "Sheep do not give birth to sheep. Sheep give birth to lambs." It's funny to them because the word "for" is a noun for "sheep" and also a verb for "give birth to". It's not funny in translation.
In English, we have, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
It's funny because both "flies" and "like" have two completely unrelated meanings, and the pattern of the first sentence sets you up to misinterpret the second sentence until you've heard the whole second sentence, parsed it and realized that it is gibberish until you back up and parse it again with the other meaning for "flies like". It's less funny after going through the technical details of it, but hey, it's still a pretty good joke.
So, who can think of jokes in Klingon that use this particular technique for making funny sentences in Klingon? The sequence of the words needs to suggest an interpretation that is gibberish until later words in the sentence force you to go back and reinterpret the earlier words.
I don't have any initial suggestions, though in my copious free time, I'll try to work on some. Meanwhile, can anybody else out there come up with anything?
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