Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy cartoon I posted about this morning, in “Nudie Tales”, had Ruthie mishearing new details as nudie tales. That reminded Gadi Niram of this Mexican cartoon (from the webcomic La Viñeta ‘The Vignette‘), turning on a similar mishearing:

(#1) con D de Dinamarca ‘with the D /de/ of Dinamarca (Denmark), with D as in Denmark’ misheard as Conde de Dinamarca ‘Count of Denmark’ (Denmark does have a number of counts): “Oh, sorry, I didn’t recognize you, Tavid, Count of Denmark”

This came to Gadi on Facebook, in a version from which someone had maliciously removed all identifications of the cartoon’s source.

The joke is widely distributed in several versions, including this texty (words-only) variant with the name Daniel instead of David:

(#2)

Conde de Dinamarca isn’t quite as good as nudie tales, since conde and con “D” are always distinguished accentually (accent on the first syllable of conde, the second of con “D”).

This entry was posted on July 8, 2019 at 11:33 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings, Spanish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.