WaT and the appearance of rhyming puns.

[AltonicKeys he/him]

This has been REALLY bothering me ever since I laid my eyes on that book. And I have a huge problem with the fact that Shallan discovers the use of puns and rhyming words. This is kind of a vent post where i complain about an inconsistency.

Sanderson mentioned that everything that we read is translated from the local language to English. (I have some other questions about the illustrations and the mix of Women's Script and English, and sometimes Steel Alphabet but that's a discussion for a later date.) Proper names and unique terms are written in the native tongue (Roshar, Navani, spren) but common words are usually translated. This is a cosmere-wide thing, seen when worldhoppers talk to locals.

So the reason that the in-world poems, Ketek, work so well is because they don't use rhymes/rhythm like traditional English poems do. Instead, they're built off the symmetry of words, which are translated. I've always loved this concept, it uses that idea of translation to make a poem without rhyming. It's why I loved the fact that there has never really been any examples of rhyming.

Now. I don't have the specific passages because I don't have the book, but Shallan tries using puns in a couple of places. I (shamefully) giggled at a few of them yes.

But these puns. You have me believe that Shallan uses words that not only rhyme well enough for the joke to work, but they also mean something that makes sense in the context of the joke, and makes sense in the context of the scene? This whole pun just so happens to work in Alethi/Veden/Thaylen, just as well as it would in English? 

If I said, "Why won't crabs lend you money? Because they're shell-fish!" in one language, and then translated it into another language, it would sound like "Because they're crustaceans!" And the joke is lost because that sounds nothing like selfish.
But if I didn't make a punchline that relies on rhymes, like "Because they're penny-pinchers!" Then that would work, since you can just turn that into "Because they're peso-pinchers!" And it would still be considered a bad pun, just not one that needs a rhyme to work!! That's all she needed to do!! Just don't rhyme!!!

I can vaguely remember a similar problem in TotES, where Hoid was complaining about "barbarian rhymes" too. But it's okay because it's Hoid we're talking about, there's probably a plausible explanation. Maybe Hoid and the Sorceress learnt English and used it for her curses.

One rhyme makes a coincidence. Two rhymes make a pattern. Three rhymes will make me angry. I dunno. Does anyone have any explanation that makes thematic sense? Does anyone have any explanation that will make me less upset? Can someone just come up with a lie to make me feel better?

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, AltonicKeys said:

But these puns. You have me believe that Shallan uses words that not only rhyme well enough for the joke to work, but they also mean something that makes sense in the context of the joke, and makes sense in the context of the scene? This whole pun just so happens to work in Alethi/Veden/Thaylen, just as well as it would in English? 

Nope, that's not quite what is happening, and we are not expected to think it is. WoB:

Spoiler

King of Herdaz

In the Stormlight books, the number ten is thematically and culturally very important. In The Way of Kings Prime, the word "tenset" is commonly used to refer to ten of something. So, when Rosharans in the published Stormlight books talk about "a dozen" of something, do they mean twelve? Or do they mean ten?

Brandon Sanderson

It's a great question. I've been using "tens" more often in Stormlight, because I've found that people will go with it. One of the problems I felt with Way of Kings Prime was that the worldbuilding, the learning curve was too steep. So when I wrote Way of Kings the new version, I scaled back a little on that. We mentioned weeks, but we don't talk about about the fact that on Roshar, a week is five days, right? We talk about hours, but we don't go into the length of time a day is. It gets all wibbly-wobbly, shall we say.

And my explanation of this is: these are all in translation. The translator (who is me) who is interpreting it, most of the time, when they say "tens," I will write "a dozen," or something like that. But not always.

Now, I am edging toward more "tens," because in-world they would use "tens." Peter is okay with this. Karen's like, "Eh, it makes continuity a little wonky." But I feel like, having gone as long as we have, people are okay dealing with more of that, so I'm leaning that direction. But understand, I am the translator presenting this to you. Pretend that, when Wit says something that's a pun in their language, I am finding a pun in English that is similar and writing it out, because he's not actually saying what the book is having him say.

But this is all just something you have to put in to imagine to keep that sense of immersion for you. And whichever one works to help you. But, yeah, they would be using "tens." They'd say "tens of" this, instead of "dozens," more often.

YouTube Livestream 13 (July 23, 2020)

It's another "level" of the translation and is similar to real life languages. Translating a Korean page - I might say "speak of the devil" (which is an English language proverb) - but the Korean might actually say 호랑이도 제 말하면 온다 (Literal translation - If you even say "tiger," he will appear) which is the same meaning and the proverbs are used in the same way, but a literal translation would just confuse some people. 

Hope that helps. 

[Returned he/him]

If pressed, I would think of it like translating an idiom. Idioms often can't be translated word-for-word but situations common enough to have an idiom might exist in more than one place resulting in an idiom for each. So one idiom in English might be translated into another language's corresponding idiom but have no words, phrases, or structure in common with the translated output. It's not literal translation, formal equivalence, nor metaphrasing.

With idioms you can't necessarily just substitute a word here or there: your "peso-pincher" example is dicey, though probably serviceable among native English speakers because the "penny-pincher" idiom is so widespread. It wouldn't work as well translated to Spanish. An Alethi equivalent might be something like "sphere squeezer", "chip clencher", "mark mordant", "broam binder", or more abstract options with totally different structures like "he who parts with money only reluctantly". They key would be that the Alethi version also be an idiom with a similar meaning. The specific words can be anything, since we know nothing of Alethi nor how people actually use it to communicate.

Since we don't know any specifics of the languages on Roshar the fix for your distress becomes easy. Either assume that English and Alethi happen to have words with similar sound-and-meaning relationships in every expressed case (but perhaps no other cases), or assume that the "translation" to English is emphasizing expressing the pun rhyme over the particular linguistic features of Alethi and so is translated to an English pun. You might think of it as primarily translating the wordplay rather than the specific words.

Cosmere books aren't fake archaeological items (like, say, The Book of the New Sun, which I appreciate and respect but disliked in its commitment to the "this was found, not written for you to consume" conceit) but are written in English for English readers, so any ideas of translation are going to be tenuous at best. If you can't get past it, here are some totally unsupported possibilities for the overlap:

• It's idiomatic translation and has little or nothing to do with the actual Alethi words or phrases used, up to and including radically changing the joke
• Different Rosharan languages, including loanwords into contemporary Alethi, provide a lot of words Shallan might choose from when making her pun. Shallan's literacy provides a vast array of options for her to make jokes in this style
• Alethi has tons of accents and dialects, providing a lot of recognizable pronunciations to choose from when rhyming, but the accent-and-dialect elements of her jokes are never mentioned nor discussed
• Alethi has a different accent structure such that this type of wordplay can be done in more dimensions than just rhyming, while rhyming is the closest equivalent English structure
• Shallan is preposterously unfunny and so her puns are worthless in Alethi (though technically valid attempts) but suggest a rhyme in English because her incompetence is hard to translate linguistically (so the only way a reader would know she attempted a rhyming pun at all is to present her comment as one)
• Shallan's particular circumstances have her accessing Connection so hard that magic is doing the work here as you read. You can't separate the magic from the effect happening any more than you can separate magic from Soulcasting and still explain it