James while John had had had ... had had had a better effect on the teacher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher

by DanielRibeiro • 13 years ago

114 74 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

rrrhys• 13 years ago

"John wrote 'had'. James wrote 'had had'. James' answer had a better effect on the teacher."

crntaylor• 13 years ago

James's answer had had a better effect on the teacher ;)

homonculus• 13 years ago

Only if the previous two sentences contain "had written."

nathell• 13 years ago

This can go on indefinitely, recursively.

The story behind this sentence is of two students comparing their texts, the one with "had" (version 1), the other with "had had" version 1, yielding 11 "had"s in a row. Call that story S_0. Now imagine a story S_(n+1) where two students write texts discussing story S_n, with version 1 replaced by the consecutive row of "had"s from S_n, and version 2 replaced by a similar row of "had"s, but one longer.

philwelch6• 13 years ago

An example which itself suggests a possible recursion:

"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?"

vacri7• 13 years ago

Fish and And and And and Chips

The correct way to do this sentence is "I want to put hyphens between the words Fish, And,* and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign"

*The Oxford comma makes a lot more sense because it reflects how we speak, but even if you omit it, this is the correct way to present a list of items - you don't use 'and' between every one.

Edit: I was wondering which other rules I was breaking with that sentence - I'm sure there's more :)

notdrunkatall• 13 years ago

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...

niggler• 13 years ago

Didn't someone show that every single sequence of words buffalo* (buffalo, buffalo buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo, ...) is valid?

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

I don't have the source for this, but I'm almost positive you are correct. I believe I remember an inductive proof that demonstrated this.

Pitarou3• 13 years ago

Here's how it works:

"buffalo" can function as a verb (bully) and a plural noun (bison).

So we can write "Bison bully bison." as "Buffalo buffalo buffalo."

I'm going to tag my groups of bison with numbers.

> Bison(1) bully bison(0).

> Buffalo(1) buffalo buffalo(0). (3 words)

Now, we can qualify bison(1), by stating that they are bullied by another group of bison, which I'll call bison(2). We can rewrite "who are bullied by bison(2)" as "bison(2) bully" (similar to rewriting "food that is liked by me" as "food I like") so we get:

> Bison(1) who are bullied by bison(2) bully, bison(0).

> Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo buffalo buffalo(0). (5 words)

We can modify bison(2) in the same way we modified bison(1), by stating that they are bullied by yet another group of bison, called bison(3):

> Bison(1) bison(2) bison(3) bully bully bully bison(0).

> Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo(3) buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo(0). (7 words)

And so on...

> Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo(3) buffalo(4) buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo(0). (9 words)

> Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo(3) buffalo(4) buffalo(5) buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo(0). (11 words)

So that gives us sentences of lengths 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, ... words. We can add a word to each sentence by just adding the qualifier "Buffalo" (meaning "from the city of Buffalo") before buffalo(0). This gives us sentences of lengths 4, 6, 8, ...:

> Bison(1) bully bison(0) from the city of Buffalo.

> Buffalo(1) buffalo Buffalo buffalo(0). (4 words)

> Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo(0). (6 words)

> Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo(3) buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo(0). (8 words)

So now we just need the sentences of lengths 1 and 2, which we can do by using the imperative. I.e. we give the general instruction "Bully." or the more specific instruction "Bully bison.":

> Buffalo. (1 word)

> Buffalo buffalo. (2 words)

The issue remains: can we call a sentence "valid" if it is entirely incomprehensible?

jkn• 13 years ago

I can't resist mentioning the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den poem I came across recently. The poet plays with the many tones and many variants of the sound 'sh' in Chinese:

  « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
  Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
  Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
  Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
  Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
  Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
  Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
  Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
  Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
  Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
  Shì shì shì shì.

Translation:

  « Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
  In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
  He often went to the market to look for lions.
  At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
  At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
  He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
  He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
  The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
  After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
  When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
  Try to explain this matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...

drakeandrews3• 13 years ago

When written in chinese, is there any more indication that it's not just the same word forty or so times than in the romanised version?

rtkwe2• 13 years ago

Chinese... you're drunk go home.

(On a more serious note that's pretty cool.)

taejo• 13 years ago

Note that this poem isn't in any "real" Chinese language. Basically, it's written in Classical Chinese, but pronounced as if it were Mandarin.

Old Chinese (the spoken language on which the written Classical form was based) had a much more complex phonology, which was simplified in Mandarin, resulting in many Old Chinese words becoming homophones or near homophones. To reduce the ambiguity, Mandarin uses many more compound words than Classical Chinese.

For example, a poet is called shīrén in Mandarin (literally, "poet person") while this poem just uses shī.

larsmak• 13 years ago

The singularity is coming: the day google translate can correctly make that translation.

hakaaaaak• 13 years ago

http://www.ci.buffalo.mn.us/Admin/Citycode/1004.htm

> Subd. 14. C. Notwithstanding the language contained in Subdivision 6 of this section, all “potentially dangerous animals,” as defined in this Ordinance, which are outside of the owner’s residence, must be kept on a suitable leash, or in an enclosure which restricts the animal’s ability to egress from the owner’s property.

Buffalo buffalo are not buffaloed by fences, but it might buffalo a Buffalo buffalo to see another Buffalo buffalo on a leash.

taliesinb• 13 years ago

Based on a simple grammar I wrote in Python there are 21 valid interpretations of this sentence: https://github.com/taliesinb/chartreuse

eliben• 13 years ago

Folks should first learn to correctly use "its" vs. "it's" and "lets" vs. "let's". Then graduate to correct past-perfect usage :-)

dmckeon• 13 years ago

Mnemonic: his, hers, its. Works for me when memory and other methods do not.

pyre3• 13 years ago

I always remember that it's "it's" because the apostrophe replaces the missing letters in contractions. E.g.

  it is => it's

The possessive of 'it' doesn't need to replace any letters, so it's just "its."

alexkus• 13 years ago

It’s is not, it isn’t ain’t, and it’s it’s, not its, if you mean it is. If you don’t, it’s its. Then too, it’s hers. It isn’t her’s. It isn’t our’s either. It’s ours, and likewise yours and theirs.

—Oxford University Press, Edpress News

speeder• 13 years ago

And I thought that Portuguese could be ambiguous....

I don't think these.sorts of phrases are valid in Portuguese.

personlurking2• 13 years ago

Can you give an example of its ambiguity? I speak Portuguese but nothing ambiguous is coming to mind at this particular moment.

slammdunc23• 13 years ago

In my Portuguese class we were given this ambiguous phrase as a riddle:

"Maria toma banho porque sua mãe disse ela traga a toalha."

We had to make those words make sense only by adding punctuation and without changing the order of any words. Can you figure it out?

For those who don't speak Portuguese, the phrase above translates to: "Maria takes a bath because her mom said to her bring the towel." Doesn't make much sense!

The trick is that "sua," which means "her" when the following noun is feminine, is also the present third-person singular of the verb "suar," meaning "to sweat." Thus, with a few commas and quotation marks, it suddenly makes sense:

Maria toma banho porque sua. "Mãe," disse ela, "traga a toalha."

Maria takes a bath because she sweats. "Mom," she said, "bring the towel."

Not nearly as ambiguous as the "had had had had" example, but a similar lesson regarding the need for punctuation.

Edit: as personlurking pointed out, suar is "to sweat," not (as I put originally) "to smell." Thanks for catching that!

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

Notice my name?

Some clever bugger managed to get ghoti

and ghoughpteighbteau doesn't fit.

Fun fact: I do not know how to spell ghoughpteighbteau, but I can type it.

artsrc2• 13 years ago

Functional languages provide the ability to (promote?) write expressions that remind me of this sentence.

Just because you can do without temporaries does not mean you should.

lclarkmichalek• 13 years ago

How so? The problem comes from having a highly context sensitive grammar, which is hardly something I associate specifically with functional languages; C++ is the usual language that people mock for having an all but Turing complete grammar. I guess the other obvious candidate is Lisp, but that's a different beast all together.

artsrc2• 13 years ago

I agree with you that the context sensitive grammar make this sentence hard to parse. However if you look at the clarifications of meaning they break things into bits.

In some languages (e.g.: Java without lambdas), you can't write a function without giving it a name. You have to break things into bits and give them names.

In the functional languages you can just create a lambda and use it.

In a functional style conditionals return values you can use directly. In languages like Java you end up having to assign to temporaries in the branches of the if.

slurgfest• 13 years ago

As English, this stuff is totally incomprehensible and unusable. Absolutely nothing is conveyed to actual human English speakers by saying the word 'buffalo' 400 times in a row.

If it is 'grammatical' then it is grammatical by virtue of conforming to some idealized grammar. But when this grammar is so far off not just from anything people say, but anything they can actually understand, it really only means that the idea that this grammar models real English has been reduced to total absurdity.

tjr• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced this one is even grammatical. At minimum, omitting the semicolon should make it a run-on sentence.

philwelch6• 13 years ago

The trick to all of these sentences is to omit otherwise necessary punctuation. The rare exceptions are sentences describing recursive concepts. For instance, if you have a radar detector, the police will catch you because they have a radar detector detector, which makes it imperative that you own a radar detector detector detector.

Here's another example: who polices the police? If there were any one agency in charge of that, certainly we would call them the police police. But who polices the police police? Clearly, the police police police police the police police.

gruseom3• 13 years ago

They're tricks, but they're far from incomprehensible. In my experience, both with this sentence and the buffalo one, there's a certain mental click when one "gets it", after which the sentence makes sense and one can "feel" its grammatical structure. It's a curious and rather Chomskyan experience. Before that, of course, the notion that such a string of words might mean anything is absurd. "Getting it" is much like those 3D visual puzzles where at first you see only a noise pattern, but when you hold it at the right distance and let your eyes refocus a certain way, a picture leaps out at you.

czr80• 13 years ago

Actually, I find it perfectly comprehensible when said aloud with the right emphasis and pacing - it's only difficult to understand when written down with no punctuation.

pippy• 13 years ago

If English was a workable language, English majors would have nothing to base their theses on. The 'had had had' exercise highlights the absurd nature of English. This philosophy on English is why it stopped evolving after its peak - post English after the death of the worlds greatest playwright Shakespeare (who wrote phonetically, may I add).

On the other hand it does give an insight into syntax trees and parsing.

vacri7• 13 years ago

Every language has absurdities. Genders for non-gendered things is one example.

What's really absurd about English is the contempt for diacritical marks. Other languages give you a clue as to how the word is pronounced, whereas in English, if I write 'wind', you don't know if I'm talking about air blowing or charging a mechanical clock unless you have context - which may come later in the sentence.

vacri7• 13 years ago

The article title is ungrammatical without correct punctuation. With correct punctuation, it's fine - and it is, after all, talking directly about an error in the very grammatical construct it is highlighting. It's a perfectly natural sentence that could easily come about in normal discussion.

The 'buffalo' one is just nonsensical - the word 'buffalo' just isn't used that way, and even with punctuation, needs to be separately explained for people to understand it - even if they are aware of the regional dialect that uses the word 'buffalo' as a verb.

jfarmer• 13 years ago

Don't take it too literally. It's meant as a kind of linguistic koan to illustrate the concept of prosody.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)

Consider the difference in how one says

    He ate that

    He ate that?

That's prosody. The difference in meaning isn't a consequence of the presence of the question mark, although that's what people think of as "grammatical." The presence of the question mark and the difference in meaning are both consequences of the prosodic differences between the two sentences.

This shows one of many challenges inherent computational linguistics: "the written word" only encapsulates a small part of what it means to "speak English" or "understand English."

As a nice benefit, it makes the sort of grammarian who obsesses over the written word look (rightly) like they're missing the forest for the trees.

Dylan168073• 13 years ago

While you have a point in there, some things are still missing. In my opinion the buffalo sentence doesn't have enough prosody to ever make the verbal version intelligible without explanation. The sentence in the OP does, but it's also missing mandatory punctuation. Punctuation conveys a solid fraction of the information prosody does, and sometimes even contains information prosody doesn't.

tspiteri• 13 years ago

And further to that, there is a difference between "He ate that?" (He did what to that?) and "He ate that?" (He ate what?)

simonster• 13 years ago

You may also be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence, which has some sentences that are clearly grammatical but not what they seem at first glance.

pfarrell• 13 years ago

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?

drakeandrews3• 13 years ago

No.

I'm going to go with no. If you'll excuse me, I need to go lie down because that sentence broke something in my understanding of english.

philwelch6• 13 years ago

Wouldn't the sentence, "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?" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and between and and between, and between between 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 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 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 Chips, as well as after Chips?

anonymous• 13 years ago

I think you accidentally a whole bottle.

gruseom3• 13 years ago

A friend of mine tells a story that's about as close as real life gets to this kind of language trick. He was helping a friend in college study for her Test of English as a Foreign Language. She was working on past tenses and, sincerely attempting to explain a mistake she'd made, he told her: "If you had had 'had' here, you would have had to have had 'had' there as well." Whereupon she screamed.

AaronBBrown• 13 years ago

During an English class in High School, my teacher (we'll call him Mr. Jones) came into the classroom and saw the following written on the blackboard.

    YOU SUCK JONES

Mr. Jones proceeded to make this into a lesson about the importance of commas.

    YOU SUCK, JONES

and

    YOU, SUCK JONES

have wildly different meanings.

drakeandrews3• 13 years ago

There was a sign in front of a lake saying:

    PRIVATE PROPERTY
    NO SWIMMING ALLOWED

But by adding a few punctuation marks:

    PRIVATE PROPERTY?
    NO, SWIMMING ALLOWED.

The meaning of the sign was reversed.

chinpokomon• 13 years ago

I get a chuckle out of the

    SLOW
  CHILDREN

signs. Should you read that as:

  Slow Children

  Slow, Children?

When you see a

  DEAF
  CHILD

sign nearby, the inappropriate interpretation is reinforced.

codeka• 13 years ago

Or that episode of the Simpons where Marge saw "SUGAR FREE DONUTS" until Apu added a comma between "sugar" and "free", and explained that it was actually sugar with free donuts.

vacri7• 13 years ago

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting, nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability transcendentalizes intercommunication's incomprehensibleness.

word 1 = 1 letter, word 20 = 20 letters. A friend didn't like "intercommunication's", but hasn't replied on the worth of 'intercommunicationy'...

mattquiros• 13 years ago

But isn't the "while John had had 'had'" segment a dangling modifier and hence, this sentence is wrong?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier

James while John had had had ... had had had a better effect on the teacher

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