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en.wikipedia.org

52 pointsbound00817 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sen...

"Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?" This sentence is much easier to read because the writer placed commas between and and & and and and And, & and and and And & and And and and, & and And and and & and and and And, & and and and And & and And and and, & and And and and & and and and.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families".

Sentences like this exist in other languages too.

My mother tongue is Shona, and this would be a grammatically correct sentence.

Vana vana, vana vana vana, vana vana vana vana.

Translates to ...

Four children, have four children, who have four children each.

In German (not the same words, but pronounced the same):

Bismarck biss Marc, bis Marc Bismarck biss.

Translates to...

Bismarck bit Marc until Marc bit Bismarck.

I feel like I've seen source code that reads like this.

Not sure if this is what you're referring to but I created a programming language after a late night discussion I had with my housemate who was studying this a few years ago. The idea was to give the sentence a syntactic meaning as well..

http://bfalo.com/ and github project https://github.com/bfalo/buffalo-lang

It was also a good excuse to learn about tokenization, compilers & interpreters.

Wow that's as close as it gets to the original article.

I was thinking of something more general like:

    foo = foo.foo("foo");

(And yes the reassignment is intentional as the returned object isn't necessarily the same as the caller.)

This makes me respect people who learn English as a second language a lot.

Do native speakers read this and naturally understand what is being said? I understand the three meanings, but I wouldn't be able to point which instances of the word have each meaning.

I still prefer "had had had had" though: "All the faith that he had had had had no effect in the outcome of his life"

As a native speaker, I had no idea what was being said. Seems like a very extreme example. Similar to the shi shi poem in chinese.

The "had had" example is much more relevant to someone learning English. Often when I construct a sentence with "had had", I question whether it looks right and if I can rephrase it.

As a native speaker and an obsessive reader, no, I had no clue. I can work it out now that I've read the description, but it's definitely not natural.

They wouldn't understand the sentence when reading it, but may when listening to it spoken naturally, with correct tones, stresses and pauses, if they're already familiar with all three uses of the word "buffalo". Not many people know of the city Buffalo, or use the verb "to buffalo" so that one's iffy. Most people speaking it would use the word "which" to introduce the restrictive relative clause to make themselves better understood. To ensure native English speakers not familiar with all three uses of "buffalo" understand it when reading it, many people would write it "Buffalo-buffalo, which Buffalo-buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo-buffalo."

Not even then. It's such a contrived example, playing with the fringes of the language. It's certainly completely nonsensical without punctuation. No native speaker would get it on the first pass, either read or naturally spoken.

It's also nonsensical in content: "things from a place, which have things done by the same things from a place, themselves do things to the same things from a place" - it's tautological.

The 'had had' versions are actually a feasible examples, and don't rely on cutting out other words to make them work. Still, it's uncommon to put so many had's together.

You probably wouldn't use four had's in that particular example though - "All the faith that he had, had had no effect..." or "All the faith that he had had, had no effect...".

"This makes me respect people who learn English as a second language a lot."

English is my secondary language. Compared to the other languages I know or have tried to learn, it's pretty easy.

Yes, because this phrase comes up a lot in conversation and the foreigners are always buffaloed by it.

My favorite of all time was the sign in Doheny library at USC which read, "No smoking food or drink in the library"

I suspect many English signs in Asian countries which use incorrect grammar, including slogans on T-shirts, have had input by foreigners here being mischievous. I particularly remember "No coming on the grass" as an English translation for "Don't walk on the grass" on signs in a park in China 10 years ago, and wondered if the translation had gone through some QA by a native English speaker.

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