Bilingual paronomasia

[Wallace Chafe]

Rory is right. The Oneida words themselves don't sound anything like
"sweet" or "lunch". An Oneida speaker would know that the Oneida word means
"sweet" in English, and that "sweet" and "Swede" sound similar. Relevant to
the second example is the fact that some Oneidas evidently referred to
Lounsbury as Lunchberry, at least jokingly.

Similar is a little Seneca story in which people went fishing for bass in a
basswood tree. Again, the Seneca word for "bass" (the fish) makes a Seneca
speaker think of the English word, which is then ambiguous between the fish
and the tree. The story would make absolutely no sense without the
bilingualism.

Should we call this bilingual paronomasia?

It all reminds me of something I wrote in Hinton and Munro, Studies in
American Indian Languages (UCPL 131, 1998) on Polysynthetic Puns. One of my
examples was based on the fact that Seneca o'gi' da:g can mean "I said
'dog'", where o'gi' is "I said" and da:g is western NY for "dog". But if
the whole thing is run together as a single Seneca word, it means "I ate
shit". People love to laugh at this kind of thing.

--Wally

> Wally wrote:
>> Are these also paronomasia? I've heard that the Oneidas in Wisconsin
> refer
>> to Swedes with the Oneida word for "sweet". And they used to refer to
>> Lounsbury with their word for "lunch".
>
> It sounds like this is even more complicated.  First they
> applied paronomasia to conceptually translate the foreign
> name into English, and then they calqued that English pun
> into their own language.
>
> Rory
>