So let’s talk about games. People love to play games, from board games
and video games to Marco Polo and Card Wars. We make a toy out of just about everything
we touch, and that includes language. From sounds to words to whole sentences, language
is a big adventure. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
So play is just part of our nature: like cats with boxes, we use whatever we have at hand
to create games. So maybe it's no surprise that wordplay is really common, all over the
world. There’s a bunch of different kinds of word games, and they draw from all different
parts of language. Some of the more common ones play with the phonemes and syllables
of the words involved.
Tongue-twisters are a great example of this. The point of a tongue-twister is to come up
with something that is deliberately hard to say, especially quickly or a few times in
a row, like "bacon pancakes, makin' bacon pancakes."
But languages use sounds differently, right? So depending on the language, you’ll find
different things hard to say. So imagine you’re in a language that really cares about how long you
pronounce your consonants and vowels for, like Finnish. In Finnish, the phrase “Idiot, don’t
hit! Beer spills!” is this: Ääliö, älä lyö, ööliä läikkyy!
Or you can go to something like Czech, where some dastardly villain has stolen all of
the vowels, and left you with this tongue twister: Strč prst skrz krk.
You can also switch sounds around, to give you something that's called a spoonerism.
These are named after the Reverend William Spooner, who was sort of notorious in 19th
century Oxford for absentmindedly saying things like “you hissed my mystery lecture” instead
of “missed my history lecture,” or “our shoving leopard” instead of “our loving
shepherd.” Although he probably didn’t do it on purpose,
a lot of humour can come out of switching sounds around like this, like telling someone
that they have mad banners, or offering them some sweet tasty belly jeans.
And this isn’t just funny in English, either. In Finnish, the process known as sananmuunnos
takes spoonerisms to a whole other level. This idea is still to swap sounds around,
like mustaa kania “black rabbit” turning into kastaa munia “baptize eggs”. But
there’s all sorts of things going on in Finnish phonology, and they have to be accounted for, too.
So it cares about vowel length - if a vowel is longer or shorter, it changes the
meaning of the word. But Finnish also doesn’t like its sounds
getting around all over the mouth. No, it likes vowel harmony: it wants the vowels to be pronounced
all in the front or in the back of the mouth.
So if you want to play this game, you have to obey the rules of Finnish, too. Your sound
swap is going to influence the rest of the word.
So something like brutto nyrkki, or “gross fist”, becomes nyttö brurkki.
Which doesn’t mean much of anything, but it shows how it works. We wanted to give you
some examples here, but the resulting words end up being usually pretty off-colour, and
we didn’t want to offend any Finnish people.
And that just proves another fact about human beings, which is that dirty jokes are popular
the world over. Anyway, the point here is that if you skip vowel harmony and said something
like nytto, that would be unacceptable. Word games have to fit the sound patterns
of your language.
So you can have a lot of fun with sounds, but you can also play around with the written
versions of language. Like palindromes, which is when a word or phrase is written the same forwards and
backwards. So like “pup”, or "BMO bomb", or “go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog."
So swapping letters like that is great for English, but Japanese doesn’t
work the same way. English uses an alphabet, writing more or less sound by sound, whereas Japanese
uses syllabaries, so writing syllable by syllable.
So, how do you make a palindrome in Japanese? Well, you just flip whole syllables around, getting
something called kaibun.
So look at something like 夏まで待つな, or “don’t wait until summer”. With the
kanji characters in there, it’s hard to tell that anything cute is
going on. To get to the bottom of things, you need to use the syllables, and you
can use one of the Japanese syllabaries for that. In hiragana, it looks like this: なつまでまつな.
And that’s much more clearly a mirror image, syllable by syllable. But you have to use
the syllabary: if you write it out in English, you get something like this “natsu made matsu na,”
which if you read it backwards, gives you an ustam edam ustan. Which isn’t cute at all.
You could also play games with the way individual letters get pronounced in your language.
And we see this a lot in how we text, like R or CU or NE1. A kind of French word play
called allographe makes full sentences out of letters, like COQP, or it's occupied, or LNNÉOPY,
Helen was born in the Greek country. Even Mozart tried his hand at this game, writing
"G A C O B I A L" - I have obeyed her enough.
Okay, so you can joke around with sounds and symbols. But you need to start playing with
meanings before you can get to one of the most loved and most maligned types of wordplay of all time:
PUNS. These come in many forms, and some of the more popular ones have even gotten their own names.
So you have malapropisms, where you switch one word for another word that sounds like it,
so like “poots and bladders” instead of “chutes and ladders”. Or calling someone
a wolf in cheap clothing, instead of sheep’s clothing.
You also have portmanteaus, where you blend two different words in order to make a new word,
like putting together "rainbow" and "unicorn" to get rainicorn, or putting together "bubblegum" and
"gumption" to get bubblegumption. Some portmanteaus have even become their own words,
like cyborg from cybernetic and organism, or emoticon from emotion and icon.
One type that’s been gaining in popularity is the so-called “dad joke”, which takes
sound overlaps and double meanings to create some groan-worthy humour. Try something like
“I was wondering where the sun had gotten to, but then it dawned on me”. But this
isn’t limited to English - Japan has dad jokes too! With pretty much the same name:
oyaji gyagu... which is “dad gag.” Here’s one that’s easy to get as an English
speaker: タランチュラの味は何ですか？ How does a tarantula taste?
酸っぱいだ！ [suppai da] Which means sour… but you can hear the supaida crawling through
the joke.
Puns can be dividing, but I love them - it’s just fun to see how people play around with their words.
Whether or not the humour works for everyone, most wordplay is trying to be funny, and so
you often get the same kinds of stuff. Jokes usually work because they twist our expectations,
or surprise us with something unpredictable, right? No one expects an actual weapon when
someone says they play an axe.
Wordplay isn’t always just fun and games, though. Our languages define our communities,
and so how we play around with language can define us, too. A lot of the ways knowledge and culture
have been transmitted down over time is through the oral tradition, and wordplay can help us
remember culturally salient information.
Like, take the traditional Jewish game of dreidel, played on Hanukkah. In this game, you spin
a top with four sides to it, and every side has a letter,
nun, gimel, hay, or shin, standing for “nes gadol haya sham”.
That means “A great miracle happened there,” which is exactly what you want to remember on a holiday.
Except if you’re playing in Israel, you swap the letter shin for pay, standing for the word po, because the
miracle didn't happen there, it happened here.
Language play is also used as a subversion of traditional authority, or to build cohesion
in marginal groups. These groups construct whole systems of playful
grammar and vocabulary, known as argots. Let’s take a look at one particular well-known example,
Cockney Rhyming Slang. In Rhyming Slang, you get a coded set of rhymes
to refer to regular English words - like, the word “stairs” would be replaced by something totally
unrelated to stairdom but that rhymes with it, like, “apples and pears”.
The idea here was to conceal your goings-on from prying ears, especially if what you were
doing was a little less than legal.
This is just one of the many argots that have arisen in communities around the world.
These languages have wordplay at their roots, but they get used to prevent the uninitiated
from understanding secret communications. French Verlan is a good example. It came together
in French prisons in the 1800s, got a big counterculture revival in the 1960s, and now
has made it into French hip-hop culture.
Where Rhyming Slang uses rhymes, Verlan swaps syllables to give you an upside-downy kind of speech.
So let’s say you want to mention your brother, but you want to do it in code.
Well, brother in French is frère, so first you chop it into two and add a vowel if you
need one: so frè-reu. Then swap them around to get reu-frè, and then
lop off that final vowel to get your finished Verlan word: reuf’.
Which kind of sounds like a bark, which I guess is extra convenient if your brother
happens to be a dog.
Or, for some marginalized groups, different languages have led to different argots.
So it’s been common historically for homosexual communities to have their own language systems
based on wordplay, like Swardspeak in the Philippines or Polari in the UK.
But a really interesting example of this comes from South Africa, where two different argots
have developed. You have Gayle for Afrikaans speakers, but then you
also have isiNgqumo, which was based on Zulu.
They’re from different backgrounds, so there’s different sets of words to play with.
So even if we like to mess around with language, the grammars in our heads still
give us rules to play by. And if we really want to be adventurous, we
can turn our games serious and create new systems, to keep outsiders from figuring out
what we’re getting at. Which, when you think about it, is pretty radical.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week.
If you didn’t groan too loudly at our dad jokes, you learned that wordplay exists for
any part of language, from sounds to words to meanings; that even when
we frolic about language, we still obey the rules; that we use wordplay to help us remember
things about our culture; and that marginalized groups can use systems of wordplay to help
define their community.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production
assistant is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team
is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we have some extra material on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Alk-tay ith-way oo-yay en-thay!