WORDPLAY IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE LOOK

This article examines wordplay traditions in Uzbek and English, arguing that each language exploits its own structural properties to generate humor, ambiguity, and creative linguistic surprise. English, shaped by centuries of borrowing from Latin, French, and Norse, draws on a vast stock of polysemous words and homophones to layer multiple meanings into a single utterance. Uzbek, an agglutinative Turkic language spoken across Central Asia, channels wordplay through morphological ambiguity, where suffix boundaries and root polysemy create opportunities for double readings that reward attentive listeners. Three domains are examined in detail: the Uzbek performance tradition of *askiya* and its English counterparts; the comic exploitation of frozen idiomatic metaphors in both languages; and the hybrid neologisms emerging from contact between Uzbek and borrowed English or Russian vocabulary. The article concludes by addressing the challenge of translating wordplay across the two languages, finding that while the mechanisms differ fundamentally, the underlying cognitive and cultural pleasure is universal.