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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

I still find the first noun phrase and relative clause (first 5 buffalo words, Buffalonian bison that Buffalonian bison bully) to be just unparsable. If you switch up the nouns it’s slightly easier to grok:

Vancouver birds Toronto bison bully

But the missing “that” connector in between the two just doesn’t parse in my brain no matter how many times as I read it.

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How about:

"Mighty bells hearty maidens ring vibrate nearby chairs."

You can move it slightly closer to see how it starts to line up.

"Mighty bells mighty bells ring ring mighty bells."

Closer...

"Mighty bells mighty bells bell bell mighty bells."

Wow, that is VERY effective reading those outloud one after the other!

I think that is the most effective way of understanding the buffalo phrase “sound” that I’ve seen.

I thought to post it but you can take it a level further.

"Belly bells belly bells bell bell belly bells."

Just realized another one.

"Dear deer dear deer dere dere dear deer."

Thanks; that finally made it click for me!

Should that be / is that clear as: "Mighty bells mighty belles bell bell mighty bells."

("maiden" -> "belle")

I thought about using belle also as an adjective.

"Belle bells belle bells bell bell belle bells."

But I couldn't find it used as an adjective in any dictionaries. I think it works nicely though.

Or......

"Belles' belle bells belles' belle bells bell bell belles' belle bells.

New Poe dropping.

What if the maidens' first names are Belle? They could be Belle belles, adding one?

I'm with you. I understand how it's _meant_ to work, but that's just not how language works in my head. Without `that`, it's just not a sentence to me.

(Yadda yadda, prescriptivism is flawed, etc. Note my "in my head" and "to me" caveats above)

But can you parse a sentence like this one? "The train your uncle just missed"

I think it's the same structure. We are just so used to add "that" or "which", but I think with a bit of practice one could omit these filler words and read the sentence just fine. Although I do think that in the Buffalo case it makes it very ambiguous.

The first issue is the threefold homnym, while the second is the use of a reduced relative clause - i.e. one that is not marked by an explicit relative pronoun or complementizer such as who, which or that [1]. Furthermore, the relative clause here is a restrictive one, so there can be no commas [2].

Reduced relative clauses are OK for conversation, but I tend to limit their use to only the simplest cases when I am writing. Leaving in the initial relative pronoun or complementizer is usually straightforward, but it is sometimes difficult to phrase a sentence so that the end of a restrictive clause is clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_relative_clause

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_relative_clauses#Restr...

Yup the omission of "load-bearing" `that`s causes a lot of parsing ambiguity in many cases, the classic example being garden-path sentences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Your comment helped me finally get the original submission, thank you!

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