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Yes. One that comes to mind is "[name]さんじゅうななさい" which can be either interpreted as "[name]-san, 17 years old" or "[name], 37 years old", depending on whether y
by needle0 6y ago
Yes. One that comes to mind is "[name]さんじゅうななさい" which can be either interpreted as "[name]-san, 17 years old" or "[name], 37 years old", depending on whether you interpret the さん(san) as an honorific or part of a number. (The sentence would usually be written in a combination of hiragana and kanji, but is intentionally written in all hiragana here to ensure ambiguity.)
- needle0 6y agoAnother one: "この先生きのこるには", which should be broken up at "この先/生きのこるには" to mean "To keep surviving going forward", but since 先生 (teacher) is such a common word, it jumps at your eyes and turns the sentence into "この先生/きのこるには" which means the nonsense "For this teacher to mushroom(verb)". Usually this doesn't happen because the "survive" part is written with more kanji as 生き残る, but here it is written in hiragana to make the きのこ(mushroom) part visible and further mess with lexing. In both cases, some liberties have been taken with notation to intentionally encourage silly mis-readings; It happens much less often in ordinary text.