Geoff, Tinman, Shu and I had a wonderful time today at the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland. It apparently is the most authentic Chinese garden outside of China. I found out that Chinese scholars love double meanings. For example, the sound for the word "bat" is "fu," which is identical to the sound of the word for "happiness." So...all along the roofline are bat-shaped drip tiles, representing the five blessings: long life, good health, love of virtue, and a painless passing.
Somehow I don't link bats to happiness, but each to his/her own.
I found out that Chinese scholars love double meanings.
I think ambiguity is important in most cultures. Jokes and poetry are two cultural artifacts I can think of that use ambiguity intentionally for humor and other emotional effect respectively. These ambiguities are going to be different on a per-language basis, because all languages have different words for concepts. Puns that work in German are hard to translate into Italian, etc.
I looked at a dictionary and in fact one of the words for bat, 蝙蝠 biānfú 'bat' contains a character (the second one) that is pronounced fú; there is another character of the same pronunciation, 福 fú 'happiness, fortune, good luck'. It is interesting that both of the characters for bat begin with the radicals 虫 (hǔi) 'insect'.
Puns that work in German are hard to translate into Italian, etc.
Shu always tells of a Marx Brothers movie he saw in French where none of the English puns worked (obviously), but they did a magnificent job of creating their own puns in French with the translation. Apparently it was such an excellent job that the audience applauded.
