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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

Any time I see language hackery like this, I can't help but think about the perennial favorite "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

(I'll save you a trip to google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo... )

Another one for the linguistic jihadists is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_ha...

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Classics! And the Wikipedia pages do a great job of explaining them.

I have a real life example. A friend in college was helping a girl prepare for her english-as-a-foreign-language exam. They were looking over English verb tenses and he wanted to correct a mistake she had made. Without thinking about it he said, "If you had had 'had' here, you would have had to have had 'have' there." She freaked out.

Edit: can't figure out if that last "had" belongs in there or not. :)

It does. Although to make slightly more clear:

"If you had had 'had' here" => "If you would have put 'had' here"

"you would have had" => "you would have needed"

"to have had 'have' there" => "to have put 'have' there"

That is the kind of really amusing sentence we say every day without thinking about it. I've caught myself saying similar things while speaking to non-native speakers, and it's always a crapshoot. We really are lazy and use the verb 'to have' a lot.

Nice example.

It's probably used considerably more in spoken English, where intonation can help with the ambiguity. I have a hard time believing somebody would use "had" so many times together in writing without trying to rephrase themselves.

'Have' is also an interesting case, because aside from meaning the act of possessing, it is also a kind of case/tense modifier for other verbs. ("I ate" vs. "I would have eaten" + "the whole tub of gelato.")

In the writing above, you put the third had in single quotes, which implies you're discussing the word usage itself rather than trying to use it again. Similarly, your intonation would probably be elongated. Granted, a non-fluent speaker may not yet pick up on these cues, but they are there.

I was surprised that I couldn't find a wikipedia page for my favorite: "Fish fish fish eat eat eat."

What does that mean?

I don't get it. I can't see any way to make "eat" anything other than a verb, and as such I can't see any way to parse it.

Fish [that] fish eat [habitually] eat [food].

OK, that explains fish fish eat eat, but what about fish fish fish eat eat eat?

(Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd be typing today.)

Just extend it.

(Fish [that] (fish [that] fish [habitually] eat) [habitually] eat) [habitually] eat [food].

Fish fish fish fish fish eat eat eat eat eat!

I don't think English works this way. The Buffalo and have/had examples are clearly valid (if extreme) sentences and their meaning leaps out once you see the trick. "Fish fish eat eat" does too, and so would "Fish fish eat eat fish". But you can't arbitrarily nest these clauses, and "fish fish fish eat eat eat" doesn't click for me. The suggested analogy, "Mice cats dogs chase eat sleep", seems accurate as an analogy because it's invalid in the same way; that is, "Cats dog chase eat" is clearly ok, but the next step of nesting is not. It would be interesting to pin down the reason.

I agree that it's no longer english as she's spoke, but it is ultimately comprehensible with difficulty. It's harder to unpack deeply nested clauses; human beings have trouble thinking on more than one levelf of the stack at the same time. Whether that counts as grammatically correct is a matter of definitions; I'd say it does, but it hardly matters.

Even with the interspersed words I still can't make sense of it.

Unlike, say, buffalo [that habitually] buffalo buffalo [habitually] buffalo buffalo [that habitually] buffalo buffalo.

There are fish that habitually eat which are eaten by fish that are in turn eaten by other fish. So, fish eat. Even fish [that] fish eat [have to] eat. And fish eat fish that eat fish that eat.

Also try it with varying nouns and verbs: Mice cats dogs chase eat sleep. (Dogs chase cats that eat mice that sleep.)

I like it because it seems to exploit a very low maximum stack depth in human sentence parsing.

Nice, I hadn't heard of the second one before. I have always maintained that English is an extremely flexible language. You can mutilate it to such an amazing degree and still make sense of it.

I'm not sure if this is true for other languages, since English is the only one I am fluent in. Maybe you can just remove "English" from my comment and make the point "language is flexible."

Just as one example, some languages (including English) derive a lot of meaning from a word in where it appears in the sentence (in "I like smoked salmon", smoked modifies the salmon, rather than referring to something I may have done), while others conjugate or otherwise modify words (frequently with suffixes) to mark what role they play in the sentence. Most of these sentences have to do with subverting expectations based on word order.

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