Comment by routerl
5 years ago
You didn't fail, it's just that this supposed translation makes a lot of assumptions about how it will be read.
I speak French, and did not immediately recognize "Un petit d'un petit" as "Humpty Dumpty"; the "correct" reading relies on knowing that a native French-speaker might pronounce "hump" as "ump". It is not simply a mapping of syllables to phonemes.
In other words, it's an extremely targeted joke, intended at people who have specific expectations about how both French and English are read and spoken.
I know another French joke that is extremely targeted in exactly the same way. It's from Canada, and it pretty much only works when read aloud.
For people who don't know the accent, French people don't typically pronounce the h initial in words like 'here', (or 'humpty' for that matter) and they add an h to vowel initial words like 'Ottawa'.
Another joke we have refers to how the French pronounce the English word "happiness."