How do you tell a joke in Chinese?
Just be discontinuous everywhere!
Note that a function is written as f: X -> Y, meaning that f takes things from the set X and sends them to the set Y.
Let's establish some sets:
X = set of all "concepts"
Es = set of all English spoken words
Ew = set of all English written words
Cs = set of all Mandarin Chinese spoken words
Cw = set of all Chinese characters
We'll assume for a start that the set X does not exist in either language, but "outside" of them. Of course the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would tell us otherwise, but we'll ignore it to a first approximation and assume all concepts can be expressed in all languages equally well. If you are still reading right now, you're probably not a linguist or sociologist, so at least we've got them out of the way.
Now let's start making some functions: We all use the function s1: X -> Es every day, its called "speaking." Right now I'm using the function w1: X -> Ew, known as "writing." You could argue that I'm subvocalizing all these words and so maybe there's an intermediate Es in there, but if you did I would ask you to join the other linguists at the next post.
Of course if you happen to be speaking Mandarin Chinese, you'll be using the function: s2: X -> Cs, known as "hua yin" (speaking), or if you're writing in Chinese then you'll use w2: X - > Cw.
These functions aren't particularly interesting, since the set X of all concepts is really complicated and hard to make structure out of. However, the function R: Ew -> Es, known commonly as "reading [out loud]" and its inverse W: Es -> Ew (which I guess is stenography?) are much simpler to deal with. Now let's take a quick break to talk about functions in math.
In mathematics (specifically analysis), a function is called "continuous" if points that are close to each other in the second set come from points close together in the first set. Essentially, this means that the functions don't separate things that are similar initially.
For the speaking (in English) function t1: X -> Es, we can see that this is not very continuous. Words that are spoken in similar ways sometimes represent similar concepts, such as "accountant" and "countable." Of course these are different words, but the roots of those words are the same (since they come from similar Latin/Greek/Germanic words). Of course, there are many words that are spoken exactly the same, and yet mean completely different things, such as "rose" and "rows."
We call discontinuities in the speaking function homophones.
Writing and reading also have discontinuities, such as in the words "wind" and "wind" (meaning 'winding a clock' and 'blowing in the wind'). They are written identically, but the concepts are entirely unrelated.
Discontinuities in the reading function are called homographs.
Words that are discontinuous in both functions are called homonyms.
Here's where it gets interesting: Written Chinese uses characters whose meanings are entirely unrelated to the word being written. Its only purpose is to sound like the word being conveyed. In other words, since spoken Mandarin has many tones that completely change the meaning, you can simply write a character representing the word with a different tone, and by adding a symbol called a "radical" that is relevant to what you're talking about, you add your own tone when reading to add meaning to the spoken words.
In other words, in Chinese there are two functions: speaking X -> Cs, and writing X -> Cw, but reading (which normally would go Cw -> X) must go through a Cs step, since it is required that you listen to the sound of the word in order to understand the true written meaning, despite the actual meaning of the symbol being only used for its sound.
Another way to say this is that the writing function in Chinese X -> Cw is intentionally discontinuous so that the "reading-out-loud" function makes sense. For example, when writing the word mā, 'mother', we first write the character for the sound "ma", in this case the black part is mǎ, 'horse'. We then add the red part (called a radical) meaning 'female'. This of course means something completely unrelated to the concept (in the set X) of 'horse', we only used that character to get into the "sound" of ma, and then specifying which "ma" we need by adding the female radical. This gives us the word for 'mother'.
Writing Chinese requires us to employ characters for concepts completely unrelated to the one we're thinking of, and the only way to reconcile this difference is to add the intermediate set Cs of spoken words, where we can see why we use 'horse' when talking about someone's mother, which in English would likely be seen as extremely rude.
Most languages have significant discontinuities, and related languages tend to have them in the same places. Learning a language is all about giving up your discontinuities you've gotten used to your whole life and accepting a whole bunch more, but with that you can see how interesting brains can be. Native Chinese speakers do not even think of the concept of "horse" when writing this character, just like native English speakers would never consider the word "grown" when talking about a "groan". Speaking of groaning, puns in English typically exploit this fact, making some kind of switch between homophones mid-sentence. I could go on about this (I can be very herbose), but I'll sage you some thyme. Basilcally we could imagine puns in Chinese being purely based in writing, where the joke is only disclovered when seeing the characters written, as opposed to hearing them read. We can imagine similar but different puns in English exploiting the fact that "rows" can be confused with "rose", "marry" with "merry", etc.
So if you want to be a comedian in another country, you have to learn all the discontinuities first.
Bonus: find all 5 herbs.
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