Comment on "Veni Vidi Veni" would be a great name for a strip club or brothel.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks agoThe point is that the joke as done by the OP makes no sense outside the English language, just as jokes in other languages based on there being words with multiple meanings or similar sounding words with different meanings in that language, make no sense outside that language.
That joke doesn’t at all work in “Latin”, it only works when translated back to English because “to come” has two different meanings.
It would never work in Latin.
howrar@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Right, as is the case for any word play. You need to know the languages involved to understand them. What I don’t understand is why they think this is a problem.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Personally, given that I speak a couple of languages, using Latin there just feels forced: suggesting “I came, I saw, I came” as a name for a stripclub or whorehouse is itself the actual funny part and putting it like that instead of in Latin makes it click much faster and for more people (as they don’t actually need to know that Veni in Latin is “came”).
The language in there only really serves the purpose of showing that the person making it is well educated and know that phrase in its original Latin, which whilst totally valid doesn’t make it any more funny, maybe even the opposite.
In my own experience the best multiple language jokes play on double entendres in the more unusual language or both languages, or in how people use expressions in their own language without thinking about individual words, but those expressions in literal form are sometimes hilarious (think about “I need to pick your brains” and now add a Zombie Apocalypse context) - for example you can wordplay with the hilarious the Dutch expression for “wasting time in details” which is “mieren neuken” (literally “fucking ants”) by totally out of the blue talking about “insect shagging” in English in the context of time being wasted, to a Dutch audience.
That said, those tend to be pretty exclusive jokes in that only a few people get it because they need to know both languages, which is especially hard when neither of the languages is English.