Monday 24 June 2013

What is allowed to be?

The main Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat publishes a controversial comic, Fingerpori. It is an awesome piece of culture, and offensive on multiple levels, but sadly, most jokes are based on wordplay, so I cannot share the joy with my non-Finnish-speaking friends.

But today they have a joke which works both in Finnish and in German:

http://www.hs.fi/fingerpori/s1305691321689

Wittgenstein am Imbiss:
"Was darf es sein?"
"Die Frage ist sinnlos."

In English it doesn't work:
Wittgenstein at a hotdog stand:
"What is allowed to be?" "What is allowed to be it?" (This is a slightly old-fashioned (at least in Finnish) way to ask what the customer would like to have.)
"The question makes no sense."

4 comments:

  1. "Another drink, Monsieur?"
    "I think not," said René Descartes and disappeared.

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  2. Shouldn't the English translation be "What is it allowed to be?"? And conversely, the German translation of the English sentence is "Was darf sein?", which reminds me of http://ingeb.org/Lieder/palmstre.html. But I digress.

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  3. I had thought that the "es" in "was darf es sein" is the Numen (the same thing which rains in "it rains" and so on). Is this not true?

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  4. Yes it is. But there is a difference between
    "Was darf sein?" = "What is allowed to be?" and
    "Was darf es sein?" which most directly would be ~ "What may it be?", but also could be construed as "What is allowed to be it?"

    ReplyDelete