Anyone got any fun language jokes or sentences that doesnt really make sense without knowing two or more languages? I will give a few norwegian examples and context explanations.
"The Big Thing has a wooden roof": The propper translation of "Stortinget har ett vedtak" is "The Parliment has a desicion". The word "Storting" can be directly translated as "Big Thing" and the same with "Vedtak" and "wooden roof"
"Its not the fart that kills you, but the smell": This is a direct quote from the norwegian rally driver Petter Solberg. What he intended was "Its not the speed that kills you, but the crash", but at the time his english was attrotious so he used the norwegian words for "Speed" and "Crash" being "Fart" and "Smell", tho he used the sound version of crash instead. There are clips of this on youtube.
I didn’t really believe that smell meant crash in Norwegian, so I looked it up. What do you know. Although Wiktionary’s etymology is not great, as best I can tell, it refers to the impact and is related to English smear or smite.
Good cross-lingual jokes are hard. Dr. Wes Robertson @ScriptingJapan is a reliable source of terrible ones. Here’s one of his recent gems:
Little known fact: the reason corn dogs (so-called "Amerikan doggu") all taste alike in Japan, no matter what conbini or yatai you buy them from, is because at the end of the day they are all made of 双生児
