Mandarin by the numbers

As spectacularly demonstrated by this YouTube video, it is amazing how much one can say in Mandarin simply by punning with numbers alone:

We've heard about speaking in tongues or glossolalia. Perhaps we could call this "speaking in numbers" or "numerolalia". Yet this is not babbling in numbers; it really conveys intelligible meaning.

I doubt that it would be possible in most non-Sinitic languages to convey with relative ease such a wide range of sentiments and meanings through punning with numbers alone. Of course, punning with numbers also occurs in other languages (e.g., 8 = ate, 4= for, 1 = won), but I think it is usually on a much more limited scale than in Chinese.

It has been suggested, for example, that Japanese is especially good for punning and spoonerisms, and there is even a word in Finnish for this sort of verbal play, sananmuunnos or kääntösana, but this is to confuse punning in general and spoonerism with number punning, which is so incredibly easy to do in Chinese.

It seems to me that the astonishing ability of Chinese to pun with numbers alone is due to the high degree of homophony in their languages, but especially in Mandarin. This is something that has already been pointed out by David Moser in "How Technology is Changing Chinese, One Pun at a Time".

I only wish to add that the puns that are worked on the numbers are not just with homophones, but with near-homophones, since the Chinese play fast and loose with the initials, medials, and finals when engaging in number punning. For example, 5 (wǔ) can stand for wū 呜 ("sound of sobbing"), wú 无 ("no; not"), wǒ 我 ("I; me"), and so forth, but that is just the beginning. If the punning is so free with regard to the phonemes, one can well imagine that the tones count for next to nothing.