If police police police police, who police police police? Police police police police police police.
And:
James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.
Also, of course Martin Gardner came up with a great one:
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?
Who police police police? Police police police police.
If police police the police police, who police the police who police police police? That would be police who police the police who police the police who police police.
Who (n)? (n+1).
If (n), who (n)? (n+1). [n > 2]
P.S. 10 edits later... Wait, is that even right? Ow, my head
P.P.S. Coding this chatbot is the next hot interview question.
Who polices Internal Affairs? Internal Affairs-police police Internal Affairs.
As I used a hyphen myself in that sentence, you could make a decent argument that English requires a bit more punctuation in the original sentence. It certainly allows it.
Actually, I don't believe it relies on unmarked compounds, or, indeed, adjectives at all. This is mentioned in point 3 in the linked article, but was surprised to see people in the email threads (e.g. Neuner) not get this.
Basically, as I understand it, there are three rules to make this continue indefinitely, using only nouns and verbs:
Rule 1: Any noun or noun-phrase can be made into a sentence by placing a verb at the end.
e.g. "Police police" is a sentence. What do police do? They police. We could also say "Cops police." Likewise it works with noun-phrases: "[Eager cops] police."
Rule 2: Any Noun phrase + Transitive verb sentence can have a noun placed at the end, as the object of the action.
e.g. "Police police police." Who do cops police? Other cops. Similarly: "Detectives investigate criminals."
Rule 3: The object of any sentence of the form above can be re-arranged by placing the object in front, to form a noun-phrase with the same number of words:
"Detectives investigate criminals" => "Criminals detectives investigate... [tend to get caught]". This can also be phrased as "Criminals THAT detectives investigate" for clarity, but the THAT is unnecessary in English.
"Police police police..." => "Cops THAT cops police... [tend to quit their jobs]
This forms a new noun phrase (a sentence fragment) that you can apply rule #1 to, and then continue indefinitely from there.
To apply these three rules up to seven words:
"Police police police: ("Cops police cops").
"Police police police police" ("Cops cops police police"): Turn the object of the sentence above into a noun phrase, from rule 3: "Cops (THAT) other cops police...", and add a verb (Rule 1): "The cops THAT other cops police, themselves police.
"Police police police police police" ("Cops cops police police cops"): Who do they police? Other cops. (Rule 2)
"Police police police police police police" ("Cops cops cops police police police"): (Rearranged noun phrase, from rule 3: The policemen (from the line above above) THAT are policed by cops that are themselves policed by cops) + (Rule 1 Verb: themselves police).
"Police police police police police police police" ("Cops cops cops police police police cops"): ... and who do they police? Other cops. (Rule 2)
...Anyway, this is how I worked it out myself, when trying to understand the buffalo sentence, and then was always very disappointed to find the variation with the capitalized "Buffalo" adjective being touted as the canonical one, since it always seemed less interesting to me.
I agree with you. This is the most profound way to interpret these kinds of sentences, and it exemplifies a consequence of how English allows you to omit the "that" in dependent clauses.
As a follow-up to my sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18410528: if your point is that the question should parallel the answer, note that the exchange could also go ”Who robs banks?” ”John Dillinger robs banks.” A question that can only be asked if you already know its answer (so as to decide whether the verb in the question should match a singular or plural noun) is not so useful!
There's an even neater way to construct these sentences. The construct "Police police police" can be construed in two different ways:
1. As a complete N-V-N sentence.
2. As a noun phrase with an implied "that" i.e. "Police [that] police police..."
So you can freely substitute "Police police police" for either the first or last "police" in the base sentence and derive a new legitimate sentence with a noun at either end. That process can be repeated as many times as you like.
That first one is a twister. If police police police police, who police police police?
POLICE police police police police police. I seriously can't stop laughing at these, they are hilarious. The fish-and-chips one, my god, what a brilliant thing.
It's leviosa, not levoisa! Jokes aside, I think I'm right. "(police(police(police))" reads as "police of the police of the police", which sounds right. I read it as "If police-police police police, who police police-police? Police-police-police police police-police."
I wouldn't even know where to put quotation marks if you asked me where quotation marks belonged between 'Fish' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and,' and 'and,' and 'and', and 'and'....
The President of the United States is going to debate the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Nobody's sure who's going to win. - "Trump may trump May, May may trump Trump."
I've never done cocaine. - "My nose knows no snows."
The guy who sketches crossbreed dogs is suitable for the role - "The labradoodle doodle dude'll do."
There's also a Japanese version of this: 子子子子子子子子子子子子
Unfortunately I can only find a Spanish language Wikipedia article about it (https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_no_ko_koneko,_shishi_no...) but its roughly "kitten is the son of the cat, 'puppy' is the son of the lion" (we don't really have an English word for baby lion)
I think it fails on most if not all definitions of specific.
"Lion cub" is specific, lion and cub are both specifiers. But "cub" is specific to juveniles of a range of species; so I'd say "not specific to lions".
Interesting then to think which species do have specific English single-word names for juveniles. Owlets, foals, and joeys spring to mind ...
French has louveteau for a wolf cub, perhaps it has a specific lion cub word too? I'd imagine Kiswahili to have a specific word, perhaps?
Not quite the same thing. The character 子 has many different readings, meaning it is pronounced differently depending on context. E.g. 子 on its own is KO, but in the word 中性子 (chuuseishi) it is pronounced SHI. Those different pronunciations can be combined to a somewhat sensible phrase when spoken. But that phrase when written would come out as 猫の子子猫、獅子の子子獅子. So it's more of a pun than a grammar quirk. I feel like it's more related to the English "word" ghoti (fish), as it's specifically a quirk of the writing system.
But I had never seen this before and it's fascinating! I don't mean to sound pedantic, I just think it's interesting how different languages have different sorts of technical oddities.
I suspect so, since this kind of thing becomes more frequent as you go back in time. I think that's the same story for why some two-character words seem to have backwards word-ording, e.g. 日本に滞在する vs 在日する, or 米国へ渡る vs 渡米する.
I've also noticed that readings seem to become more liberal in general. These days we tend to think of kanji having rigid associations to readings; however, you'll sometimes see some characters replacing semantically similar ones, despite the readings being different.
I also suspect this flexibility is how Japanese acquired such a complicated mapping between it's written and spoken forms.
Blah, blah blah. You get me on this subject and I can ramble endlessly. :)
If we're going off on a tangent: in Dutch, you can have a sentence ending in seven infinitives: "Ik zou hem wel eens hebben willen zien durven blijven staan kijken." (I would have liked to see him dare to stay stand watching.)
(Although Dutch and German syntax are almost identical, this doesn't work in German.)
Thanks for sharing that. I'm learning Dutch (Flemish) for the last two-ish years, taking night classes). I heard my teacher say you can string along three infinitives, but didn't realize you can go up to seven!
I recently finished B-2 and now "C-1" level[+]---the most difficult so far. I'm going to persist...
Police is a much better word for this, IMHO. :) To spell it out, it's an adjective (e.g police car) verb (e.g. police the streets) and obviously a noun. Buffalo has never struck me as a very good verb...
Here in the UK, I've never seen buffalo used as a verb, so the buffalo sentence has never seemed all that clever to me.
I've always preferred the publican's complaint - "This sign is painted wrong, you missed the spaces between Dog and and, and and and Duck" - because it doesn't rely on unmarked compounds like police-police or Buffalo-buffalo no-one uses outside linguistic puzzles :)
You could tack on several more if the fragment being corrected is "...conjunctions like butandandandor..." so that they are missing spaces between but and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and or, and commas would help immensely.
It's subjective of course, but for me buffalo is more satisfying because the noun, adjective and verb are all totally different words, whereas for police they're all variants of the same root.
I'm pretty sure all variants of buffalo are from the same root?
Edit: A buffalo is a member of a number of species of large antelope, to buffalo is to either act as a buffalo or hunt buffalo, and Buffalo is any of several places where there used to be a lot of buffalo before people buffaloed them to near extinction.
On the other hand, there's a town in Poland called Police...
Although antelope and buffalo are both in the family bovidae, a buffalo isn't a large antelope. That's especially true of the animals that Americans call buffalo and antelope, where Antilocapra isn't even in that same family.
"An antelope is a member of a number of even-toed ungulate species indigenous to various regions in Africa and Eurasia. Antelopes comprise a wastebasket taxon (miscellaneous group) within the family Bovidae, encompassing those Old World species that are not cattle, sheep, buffalo, bison, or goats."
- they're defined by where they're from and what they aren't. There are 91 species. So, for example, a gnu (wildebeest) is an antelope.
"alarm, overawe," 1900, from buffalo (n.). Probably from the animals' tendency to mass panic. Related: Buffaloed; buffaloing.
Buffalo
city in western New York state, U.S., of disputed origin (there never were bison thereabouts), perhaps from the name of a native chief, or a corruption of French beau fleuve "beautiful river."
I don't think it makes sense to say that "police" is an adjective in the same sense that "happy" is an adjective. Otherwise all nouns are also adjectives. _Any_ noun in English can be placed in front of another noun to serve as an attribute, because that is a feature of English syntax, but that is different from the distinction between nouns and adjectives as classes of words. The decision to use the word "adjective" both for the part of speech and for the syntactical role is a mistake.
It may not be the original video, but a video presentation of it is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk by the original author, contrary to the link's claims. It is probably the better way to approach the paper, due to the importance of timing in comedy and the fact that paper presents so much to you in a way that it can't control the timing, though unfortunately the video resolution is quite low. Plus the Q&A is pretty good.
It is an amusing combination of video that is a trenchant commentary on the excessive similarity of the vast bulk of hard science papers, and a video that my four year old enjoyed back in the day. That puts your standard "family friendly" comedy movie to shame in terms of how much comedy ground it is capable of covering.
This rides entirely on your local vernacular having a verb "buffalo" which means "to bully". I'm not sure how widespread that is but I sure never heard it before reading an explanation of this sentence.
Merriam-Webster has the verb "to buffalo" as going back to 1891, with no notion of it being specific to any particular locale. The OED says it's "North American slang," while Google's dictionary calls it "informal". I've certainly heard it in conversation on the east and west coasts of the U.S. (albeit very occasionally). [Added:] For all sorts of American examples over the decades, see https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/buffaloed-by-the-...
It works for any noun that is also a verb and a place name. It might not make sense depending on what the noun and verb mean but it would be grammatically correct. If there's a town named Fish then you could substitute fish for buffalo.
I can see a Dr. Seuss style of book being written about "smelt" since it's a noun (a fish) a verb (extract metal from ore) and when spoken it's not very distinguishable from "smelled" and both "smelts" have are relatively strong smelling.
What I find most fascinating about this story is the "I'm certain I came up with this" notion, given the last several emails on that webpage. Memory is a terribly imprecise thing. We seem to fill in gaps with other memories that are shaped to fit the gap, or we logically reason it out without telling ourselves that we are using logic not memory. I personally have very detailed provably false memories.
Speaking of words ... here's one of my favorite German compound words:
Verschlimmbesserung — "an intended improvement that makes things worse"
I'm sure many of us here can relate to the word :D
History of the word:
"This construction doesn’t just present contrasting concepts. It also employs a playful use of German’s grammatical structures to tie them together. The word begins with two verbs – verschlimmern (“to worsen”) and verbessern (“to improve”). It then conflates their prefixes (ver-), and adds the suffix (-ung) to turn it into a noun. This process compresses an idea that only a wordy English translation can unpack: “an intended improvement that makes things worse."
I'd say that it's an example of a flaw in the english language: I don't know german but I think that the fact that not all words are exactly the same in the sentence will make it easier to parse.
I'm not a native English speaker but I think I'm fairly proficient, and I find that I struggle parsing newspaper and website titles much more often than I would expect - I never struggle when speaking with people. I think this is due to the fact that short sentences omit articles and prepositions, which makes english way harder to parse since it doesn't have the redundancy in grammatical cues that other languages have.
Unfortunately I don’t think the German variant works due to the verb “büffeln” being intransitive.
Apart from that, the presence of inflection in German renders the sentence less aesthetically pleasing but alleviates the exact ambiguity that dogs the English example so I’d see it as a plus.
“For n>=2, a(n) gives number of possible ways to parse an English sentence consisting of just n+1 copies of word "buffalo", with one particular "plausible" grammar.”
A famous one in Chinese is The Lion-Eating Poet in a Stone Den, which has all characters sounding out as "shi": http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML
This is somewhat cheating since not all the "shi" are in the same tone.
In general, homophonic sentences are easier to write in Chinese because (1) it's a monophonic language, so the set of possible syllables is small and (2) Chinese grammar is flexible, and words can be liberally rearranged in a sentence and still read fine.
Frankly I'm not surprised. The only bison in the city of Buffalo are in the zoo. As we all know, bison are native to the great prairies, and would be happy only if they had freedom to roam. It must be very stressful for them to be cooped up in small spaces. So they are likely to take out their frustrations on their fellow zoo residents.
Shame on Buffalo for condoning animal cruelty! They should close down the zoo.
Probably a more of a statement about my sense of humor than anything else, but this is, by not even close, the funniest thing I have ever read on Hacker News!
The 'sentence' is not correct English because it's missing important punctuation marks. In fact, it's not a sentence.
The definition of a sentence according to Google is: "a set of words that is complete in itself...". Without punctuation, it is incomplete; so it is not a sentence. Maybe it's a phrase?
i know a german one which almost also works in english: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher" which should translate to: if behind flies flies are flying, flies are flying behind flies.
The beauty of English is the process of 'verbing', where we can turn arbitrary nouns into verbs. Schooled in Commonwealth English, I wasn't familiar with buffalo being used as a verb but others in this thread have cited its meaning.
If police police police police, who police police police? Police police police police police police.
And:
James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.
Also, of course Martin Gardner came up with a great one:
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?