Please, no more aRGy-baRGy! :-)

I recommend you begin reading information like:

http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/viewFile/4819/4635

I agree, Ramón, a good way to start with. Thanks

Jorge

Found via Scholar:

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~binsted/papers/Binstedthesis.pdf

Dear Henk,

Good point. When we analize puns and/or jokes for the sake of their linguistic or cultural value we certainly miss their flavour and cleverness.

Thanks

Jorge

Dear Jorge

Can a punner who can pun anything pun a pun?

Attaching a cartoon someone referred to as 'visual pun'

Narayanan

Dear Narayan

Great contribution and open to interpretations. I would place it as discursive pun, and yes it has to be visual (context) as well.

Great satire, sarcasm and irony line (backfired) applied to our educational situation, believed to be critical in most countries: "I would invite you to my obedience school..." and the assumed "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", great!

I made me wonder for several minutes before getting the depth of it

I enjoyed it very much, thanks.

Jorge

Jorge

In Indic languages, we read just as we write; therefore I think we lack 'puns'. The term we use is 'slEsha', (as in slept) ie homophony; no separate term for puns.

Malayalam, my mother tongue, is an agglutinative language; we can fill one whole page with a 'one word' sentence! The 'pun', or rather the fun, starts when the other fellow starts reading it and splits at wrong places (well you have to catch your breath, isn't it). I am not sure into which category they come, other than pun.

Malayalam has another unique feature, not present in any other language i think. About 75% of the words are Sanskrit. A few poets of past has written poems in which if you split and join the letters, you get a Malayalam poem; if done in another way, you get a Sanskrit one with entirely new meanings. There is no rearrangement of the letters at all. This needs extraordinary capability and I don't think there is any one who can do this now.

Another area of fun, may be pun, involves the use of 't' which is an orthographic doubling of the letter R; and some invole the conjunct letter nTa, which is written as nRa. Read my article in RG about Latin Malayalam and Ra-Ta.

Thanks

Narayanan

Dear Narayanan,

Thanks for sharing your knowledge about indic languages like Malayalam of which I am pretty ignorant. There is a lot to lean about these ancient languages. Yes, PUNS should be a different story in Indic Languages.

Thanks again

Jorge

In Afrikaans, a particular example of a pun is to refer to a "fiets" [=pedal cycle] as a "baie sukkel" [=struggle much], because this sounds roughly like the sound of the English word 'bicycle'. Love it. But you have to be bilingual to understand the pun. Open a new category: Cross-language puns.

Dear Ian,

Yes, Cross-Language indeed. Just difficult to believe it's homophonic coincidence. Very intriguing. I wish I'd be bilinguial in Afrekaans.

Thanks

Jorge 

You are very right, Ian. We call this cross language homophony (vibhinna slesha). But we don't have a term for pun, and we can't use the English term: it means 'to do' as well as'f**k'!

Narayanan.

Dear Jorge

I want to ask a questuon which may be visually 'punny':

"Will upvotes by the asker promote the urRGe to answer?"

;-)

Narayanan

Dear Narayanan,

I believe people in chaRGe must have worked it out, at large.

Jorge

At laRGe you mean?

:-)

Narayanan

Please, no more aRGy-baRGy! :-)

Don't forget the shaggy dog story, which always ends with a very bad (often extended) pun. (Two lips from hamster jam, for example).

There are many such cross language expressions in Arabic language. However, I can not give examples here in RG because there meanings are mostly unsuitable. Famous old Arabic tale books like " One and a Thousand Nights" are full of these so-called PUNS. You can refer to an English translated edition.

Best regards

SM Najim

You find quite a few puns in old English literature. I recall one Shakespeare work mentioning case of Hart as Heart. "will you hunt the hart , my Lord?"

The master replied "What a noble heart I have.

Another was  Edward Said when his used the word "cover" to suggest media concealing the events rather than reporting the events.

Dear Syed,

Yes, it is a one-word homophonic posysemic (not made-up) pun which accounts for the majority of puns. There are other types completely different but not less clever and amusing: "Who wrote 'A Farewell to Arms?' -The Venus de Milo"

I believe It fall into the category of puns but of a different kind.

Thanks for your contribution

Jorge