Language quirks

[Terminus_Est]

:smack: Man, those are like those awful German sentences that Mark Twain wrote about.

http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/tramp_ap_d.html

There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech – not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary – six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam – that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens; finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it – after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb – merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out – the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haven geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

[Fern_Forest]

We’ve got a funny pidgin line here.

Cow no kau kau horse kau kau, cow kau kau cow kau kau

kau kau meaning both food and to eat and sounding like cow cow. What can you expect from a language where the most famous dictionary is a joke book.

[Miller]

“Marklar, these Marklars want to change your Marklar! They don’t want this Marklar or any of these Marklars to live here, because it’s bad for their Marklar! They use Marklar to try and force Marklars to believe their Marklar! If you let them stay here, they will build Marklars and Marklars! They will take all your Marklars and replace them with Marklar! These Marklars have no good Marklar to live on Marklar, so they must come here to Marklar! Please, let these Marklars stay where they can grow and prosper without any Marklars, Marklars, or Marklars!”

[matt_mcl]

Here are a few more:

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi.
The prime number few.
The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR.

All these statements are grammatical and sensible.

[snermy]

Le vert ver va vers le verre.

The green worm goes towards the glass.

Heard it as a tongue twister used in french class (particularly bad because most english speaking students already mangle their r’s)

vert =green, ver= worm, vers= towards and verre= glass are all pronounced the same.

[Atticus_Finch]

@Don't bother me

Malay: Aku aku aku aku

English: I admit that I am myself.

<nitpick>
Not quite. You can’t really dispense with the prefixes and suffixes, especially as they make the verb transitive. Also, while Malay / Indonesian don’t quite have the verb “to be”, as it is used in English, they do have a couple of words meaning “is” to avoid this kind of confusion. So maybe “Aku mengakui aku adalah aku” might be better.
</nitpick>

[Don_t_bother_me]

Not quite. You can’t really dispense with the prefixes and suffixes, especially as they make the verb transitive. Also, while Malay / Indonesian don’t quite have the verb “to be”, as it is used in English, they do have a couple of words meaning “is” to avoid this kind of confusion. So maybe “Aku mengakui aku adalah aku” might be better.

Ah, well, usually the prefixes and suffixes are left out in everyday conversation, we tend to use them only in formal conversations, or when you can’t really express the relationship of the word with another. While ‘Aku mengakui aku adalah aku’ is ok, we don’t really use them when talking to family members and friends.

The diglossia here is horrible, a foreigner won’t be able to understand us if we talk ‘normally’. The final a’s turn into shwas, the final i’s get a glottal stop tacked to them, and words get shortened. For example, ‘hendak’ becomes ‘nak’, or more appropriately, na’, with a glottal stop behind.

I’m not sure about the ‘adalah’, I think that ‘ialah’ is better, as ‘aku’ is a personal pronoun, but the sentence sounds funny; aku mengakui aku ialah aku.

P.S, To be really anal about things, ’ Aku mengakui yang aku adalah diriku sendiri’ will be used.

[Gest]

@Terminus Est

Those are certainly grammatically correct, but are they supposed to mean anything? I’m sure that there are any number of meaningless statements in any language that are grammatically correct.

How could a grammatically correct sentence not mean something? Certainly, other languages can have that kind of ambiguity but it’s easier in English than German, Russian or Latin which are respectively more highly inflected. A similar example to Matt’s is She said that that ‘that’ that that boy used was wrong.

A better example of ambiguity is What’s that in the road ahead? or with a punctuation change; *What’s that in the road, a head?

What is this thing called? Love?*

[Shade]

@Gest

How could a grammatically correct sentence not mean something?

You could make a case for something like “She swallowed time” or “Happiness is venus” being meaningless but grammatically correct. However matt_mcl’s sentances seem beyond meaningful - several seem actually true. I suspect the confusion arose from someone who hadn’t parsed them right (as I didn’t the first time) and looked at them as random conglomorations of words.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Gest

How could a grammatically correct sentence not mean something? *

Well, a grammatically correct sentence does have to mean something, but that meaning need not be logically or semantically sound, cf. the famous examples of Chomsky,

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

vs.

Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

In both, each pair of adjacent words is either an impossibility, or a complete non-sequitur, but the first specimen is clearly grammatically sound. In fact, the second example is nothing more than the first one spoken backwards, but it often takes a second or third glance before the reader realizes that. It did for me, anyway.

[E.Thorp]

@E. Thorp

Foggy childhood memory, but I think there’s one in German that goes:

Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen, Fliegen Fliegen fliegen nach.

(When flies fly behind flies, flies are flying after flies.)

It occurred to me while wheeling my shopping cart around Target this evening that I’d gotten the Wortstellung wrong. Paying careful attention to capitalized nouns versus noncapitalized verbs, it should be:

Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach.

Oh, I’m sooo embarrassed…

[SnakeSpirit]

@emekthian

My favorite is “telya telya telya telya telya”- because of its own nature, confusion twists around itself. I can’t remember what language this is in, though.

At that point, does it even matter?!?!?!?

[Shalmanese]

I’ve seen the 72 word Chinese poem, it’s actually quite clever.

For english, you can go better on the Buffalo with:

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

That is, the buffalo from Buffalo that buffalo the buffalo from Buffalo are themselves buffaloed by the buffalo from Buffalo.

[matt_mcl]

@Shade

However matt_mcl’s sentances seem beyond meaningful - several seem actually true. I suspect the confusion arose from someone who hadn’t parsed them right (as I didn’t the first time) and looked at them as random conglomorations of words.

Yup, you got it.