Do You Like Puns?

I love puns! I especially love the silly puns that elderly Japanese people enjoy.

For example: ダジャレです。ダージャ（Here is a pun. Please listen!）

I love puns so much that I made one in English: “I sent a cent.” Hooo!

But I found something interesting. It is much harder to make puns in English than in Japanese! Why is this?

I think it is because Japanese has many words with the same sound. English does not have many words with the same sound.

Let me show you what I mean.

In Japanese, think of words that sound like “せん.” You can find many words: 戦、線、選、千、仙、船、栓、先、宣、潜、専、扇、腺… It’s hard to stop!

But in English, think of words that sound like “sent.” You can only find: sent, cent, scent. That’s it!

I looked into English history and found a surprising story. English words actually want to sound different from each other!

Here is the simple story:

Long ago, English sounds changed a lot. This change is called the “Great Vowel Shift.”

For example, the letter “o” used to sound like [o]. But it changed to sound like [ou] (two sounds together).
The word “gold” used to sound with a simple [o]. After the change, it sounded like [ou].

After this big change, some problems happened. Some words that used to sound different now sounded the same!

For example, the word “bought” (past tense of “buy”) used to sound like [ou] – the same as “gold”!

So English speakers had to say “I bought gold” with two [ou] sounds. This sounded like a pun! They did not like this.

What did they do? They changed how “bought” sounds! Now “bought” sounds like [o:] (a long “o” sound).

So now we say “I bought gold” with two different sounds: [o:] and [ou]. Much better!

This shows us that English speakers do not like words that sound too similar. They change the sounds to make them different.

That’s why it’s harder to make puns in English than in Japanese!

Today I talked about small details. You might say, “Don’t split hairs!” But isn’t it better to split hairs than to split a hare?