One sometimes gets the sense that truly new jokes are a rare thing indeed. I recall one of my rare viewings of Jon Stewart, who, I gather, is supposed to be some sort of speaker of truth to power for the era of Bush fils (though what niche he occupies now I really do not know). In a brief section on the war-crimes tribunal then underway at The Hague, the former VJ took the opportunity to riff on what struck him as the impossible spelling of Serbian names. There was one Serbian named 'Bogoljub'. Stewart pronounced this word slowly and unbelievingly: Bog-ol-joob? And he added: "Come on, that can't be a name?!" As it happens, Bogoljub is the South Slavic variant of the lovely name Theophilus or Théophile, and thus suggests either loving God, or being loved by God. And 'j', as I discussed recently, has other pronunciations than the one familiar from Stewart's own given name.
Anyway this riff put me in mind of the rather more successful joke from The Onion more than a decade ago, about Clinton deploying an emergency shipment of vowels to Bosnia, and it also got me wondering how long the apparent difficulty of Slavic orthography has served as a source of humor in the West.
At the age of ten or so, thus long before I knew anything about Polish culture, I learned a joke from a little booklet that I held most dear, and that I probably should never have been permitted to read, called, I think, Truly Tasteless Jokes. The joke ran as follows:
Q: What does a Polish man give his newlywed that's long and hard?
A: His last name.
I confess that at a strictly formal level I still like this joke. While serving as a classic instance of what Kant called "the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing," it nonetheless involves a reversal of the usual direction of motion from set-up to punchline: rather than experiencing a transformation from the lofty into the obscene, or from the abstract into the ridiculous, we move instead from the obscene to the (merely) linguistic.
I was surprised recently to come by yet another variation on the Stewart-Onion-Tasteless theme in none other than Voltaire. Writing in 1761 to a certain Kammerherr Shuvalov, and thus to someone no less a Slav than the butt of his inevitable joke, Voltaire observes:
Je vois Joanovis Basilovis orthografiés ainsi: Joanowitsch Wasiliewitsch. Je souhaite à cet homme plus d'esprit et moin de consonnes [I see that 'Joanovis Basilovis' is spelled 'Joanowitsch Wasiliewitsch'. I wish this man more intellect, and fewer consonants].
Here, interestingly, Voltaire's version of the joke moves not from the obscene to the linguistic, but from the lofty to the linguistic, yet the effect is largely the same, and no less based than the other variations on the joke in total ignorance of the rationality of Slavic spelling.
Let me just point out in this connection that 'Joanowitsch Wasiliewitsch' (which is already a Germanization of a Slavic name, and has little to do with Slavic spelling, except to the extent that German and Polish pronounce 'j' and 'w' in the same way) should not really be spelled 'Joanovis Basilovis' at all, if the goal is to render the Slavic name as faithfully as possible in French orthography. Rather, it would be 'Ioanovitch Vasiliovitch'. And this, in fact, has only two fewer consonsants than the version Voltaire so prefers, since the German 'tsch' can be taken care of by the French 'tch' (English can pull off the same feat with only two letters). Is one letter per word really enough to warrant a joke? Or is Voltaire just relishing his own ignorant French provincialism? In the 18th century, no doubt, it was easy to mistake this particular species of provincialism for universalism, just as today it's easy to suppose that English alone assigns the correct values to Latin letters.
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