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As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
by dandare 11y ago
As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
- function_seven 11y agoHa, yup. I think a good corollary is prefix vs. infix notation in programing languages. With prefix (or RPN) notation, it's impossible to be led down the garden path. The rules are simple and unambiguous. For example, 4+5×3 is a garden path, where reading left-to-right you may think to yourself, "four plus five is nine, then nine times... wait, I have to backtrack and handle five times three first..." Whereas + 4 × 5 3 can't be confused. (Or 4 5 3 × + in RPN) I'm not a (good) speaker of any other language than English, but I can see how adjective/verb/noun ordering in different languages can prevent this problem.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoRPN does have the advantage that it's unambiguous, yes, but if you miss a token you will end up confused.
- jjnoakes 11y agoWon't you be confused if you miss a token in a non-RPN parse?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoYes, but the difference is less drastic.
- jloughry 11y agoAnd this sentence: The girl the boy the dog hit bit cried. measures the depth of the stack in human brains.
- mikeash 11y agoI think I've suffered an overflow, and I bet it's exploitable too.
- function_seven 11y agoYeah, it exceeded my own stack :). Is it, "The boy hit the dog, the dog then bit the girl, who then cried?" Some of those verbs are binary operators (transitive), others are unary (intransitive).
- jloughry 11y agoArgh! You're right; I got the words out of order. It should be: The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried. I tried parenthesising it; I tried Lisp syntax (you're right; it's the mix of direct and indirect objects that complicates things); nothing worked. It's a diabolical sentence. The best I could come up with was this: In step 1, the dog bit the boy. In step 2, the boy hit the girl. In step 3, the girl cried.
- unhammer 11y agoother languages have them as well: https://www.quora.com/Are-garden-path-sentences-possible-in-languages-other-than-English?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Are-garden-path-sentences-possible-in-... (though wikipedia claims[citation needed] it mostly affects analytic languages)
- Someone 11y agoAlso, the Wikipedia page links to German (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzwegeffekt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzwegeffekt) and Dutch (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuinzin https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuinzin) versions. The details of the grammar of the languages makes the methods one can use to achieve the initially ambiguous parse different, though.
- wodenokoto 11y agoIt's a thing in all languages.
- jobigoud 11y agoIt seems to me that English is more prone to it due to the easiness of turning nouns into verbs (as opposed to French for example).
- tmalsburg2 11y agoTo say that it exists in all languages is perhaps a bit strong, but, yes, most do. However, there are difference in the degree to which ambiguities occur. German, for example, has many morphological cues that allow the comprehender to rule out alternative interpretations. The price is that German tends to be slightly more verbose.