The other day we were talking about how Chinese puns work, playing on tones vs other phonemes or both. Here’s one from my daughter’s math book that tickled my nine-yr-old funny bone. It depends on a tone change and a phoneme change, but since in this case it’s a phonemic distinction that exists only for some versions of Mandarin, it works that much better as a pun.

(As with the last joke, translation after the break in case you’re practicing character recognition)

老师：你能列举出中国的数学家吗？

学生：数不清

老师：对，苏步青就是其中的一位。

And now some translation:

老师：你能列举出中国的数学家吗？
Lǎoshī: Nǐ néng lièjǔ chū Zhōngguó de shùxuéjiā ma?*
Teacher: Can you name China’s mathematicians?

学生：数不清
Xuéshēng: Shǔ bù qīng
Student: (they’re) countless

老师：对，苏步青就是其中的一位。
Lǎoshī: Duì, Sū Bùqīng jiùshì qízhōng de yī wèi.
Teacher: Right, Mr. Countless (Sū Bùqīng) is one of them.

Nice, especially for southern varieties of Mandarin that don’t have a s/sh distinction, in which case the only difference between 数不清 (Shǔ bù qīng) and 苏步青 (Sū Bùqīng) is the tone on the first syllable.

Well, come to think of it, there’s one other difference that at least in Beijing Mandarin would be quite apparent: lack of stress on the 不 (bu). I’ve heard there are far fewer unstressed syllables farther south, but I don’t have any experience with that.

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*Re the Pinyin: I’m usually a stickler about including Pinyin, because I think any non-Mandarin language site that discusses Chinese should do the courtesy of including romanization. Still, sometimes you get lazy. But now that Google Translate is getting so good with Pinyin, there’s really no excuse. Just click the “Read phonetically” button at the bottom and presto! copy and paste, tweak a bit, and be done with it.