Fuddisms

Numerous works of fiction are published in translation, with dialogue translated into the target market's language. But puns don't translate. This presents a challenge to a work's author to somehow make puns in the language of the setting work in the language of the reader. For example, Ted Woolsey did a good job of finding appropriate substitutes for Japanese puns in Super NES-era games by Squaresoft. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has several puns, such as a young hobbit's cry of "G for grand" when Gandalf writes his initial very early in The Fellowship of the Ring, which according to the appendices of The Return of the King were allegedly translated from the original Westron.

Noeneg, one of the dominant languages of the game world, is spoken differently in various regions, just as English is in the real world. Some dialects have merged consonants, causing words to become homophones, and a couple of these mergers (such as /x/ &rarr; /f/) have even become standard. One way to represent puns based on consonant mergers is by playing with consonants in English.

Fuddisms
These puns work in a derhotic dialect that merges /r/ to /w/ and in some cases /l/ to /w/, such as Hong Kong English, Cockney, or the dialect by Elmer Fudd or Barbara Walters. For the benefit of silent readers, the setup uses standard spelling, and the punchline represents [w] as "w". To see the whole joke phonetically, pass this page through The Dialectizer.

The United States can be divided into two regions. There's the east coast, and then there's the west of the countwy. At least Europe has a Nohwegian.

A short man arrives at a horse stud farm and asks the owner for help in looking at a mare.

"Can I see her mouth?" The owner holds the customer up in front of the mare, and the customer gets a good view of her mouth and eyes.

"Can I see her ears?" The owner carries the customer around the side.

"Can I see her twat?" This pushes the owner's button, and the owner shoves the customer's face into the mare's private parts.

"Aww I wanted was to see her wun awound. Maybe I should have asked to see her gawwop fiwst."


 * "Dong Quai" on Not Always Right

English has already largely merged /r/ right with /rʷ/ write and /w/ wight with /xʷ/ white. Hognoxious points out that a derhotic dialect would merge all four, where "whiteboard" is misparsed as "writeboard". "Are they called that because you wite on them so people can wead it?"

Doing magic isn't the only way to become witch.

Other
There are other conventions for representing the treatment of /x/ in various Noeneg dialects in an English work, involving plays on the highly irregular sound changes reflected in the English digraph gh. To represent a language with a different set of mergers than that of the viewpoint character, one may have a character pronounce all gh sounds as /f/ as in laugh, which may be indicated in eye dialect as ph. Consider for example The Pilgrim's Progress, where daughter rhymes with after. One might represent a more conservative dialect than that of the viewpoint character, where all /x/ sounds are still pronounced close to [x], by replacing gh with ch, as in lowland Scots.