So, I know absolutely nothing, nada de nada, about Ancient Egypt (except the usual cultural osmosis things), but I have something to add to this.
Hi, I have a degree in philology, I work in translations and I kinda love world literature and old(er) literature (but not, like, Ancient Egypt old).
So, a few things come to mind here regarding these jokes:
1. If you’re not really laughing, that’s to be expected. The stuff above is scholarship, aka, “we will dissect this to the best of our abilities to see what makes it tick”.
This makes you understand jokes, but not necessarily laugh at them. Because an explained joke is no longer that funny. Fascinating, maybe. Funny? Eh.
2. This is not what those jokes sounded like to Ancient Egyptians. You know, this one might go without saying if you think about it, but… if you don’t think about it, it’s not that obvious.
Languages are fascinating because they’re way, way different from each other than you’d assume if you only know one, or even a few that have the same roots. Grammar is different, the numbers of homonyms are different, the underlying assumptions are different, the euphemisms are definitely different.
But no matter what the language is like, the people who speak it natively will always be fluent in them. They can be witty, funny, clever without the slightest hesitation, and their language will feel perfectly natural to them because it’s their own and it thus comes naturally to them. It’s not archaic or exotic if it’s what you use at home.
Not a joke, but let me show you the reverse of this - what happens when you give English a similar treatment:
Everyone
Swing* your body [* A pun with a type of music; but also with the idea of excitement and energy]
Everyone
Swing your body correctly* [* This is probably inserted for rhythm purposes, rather than an indication of how to swing]
The back alley* has returned, for sure [*This is the name of the band, but it contains the word for “return”, thus creating a pun]
Wow* we’ve returned again [* This literally translates as “My divinity!”, but the expression has lost its religious connotations, becoming an interjection of shock or excitement]
Male and female siblings, everyone sing
Yes, this is the broken down and annotated “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, now with synonyms to reflect what happens when translating. It sounds very different in the original.
3. In your standard translations, there’s a lot of adaptation happening.
The reason why the novels and poetry you read in translation sound much friendlier isn’t that modern languages are somehow special in this regard, or that we’ve come a long way since Ancient Egypt, or what have you.
we know a lot more about them, generally speaking, and we can have bilingual people and natives checking them out
our assumptions of what those books should look like are different
or purpose in reading those books is different
If I read a Japanese novel, I want to know the story, the characters, the style. It’s pretty much the same desire as if I read an English novel. But when I read about Ancient Egypt, which isn’t easily comprehensible or close to me, I expect a distance and difficulty in the text. And also, maybe I want to understand how their language and jokes were, because they’re so far away.
Now, there’s a lot that can be said about what translators do when the author Speaks in Funny Ways even for their own language (for reasons of poetry, for example), but generally, and we won’t get into that.
But what I wanted to say is that if we had time-traveling Ancient Egyptians who spoke English and became, I don’t know, jaded detectives watching people in a bar, you could have one of the lines in their noir novels read, “I gulped down some gin and thought it’s like the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq says: Men would fuck around even more than donkeys do, but they just don’t have the money for it.”
