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Am I the only one who just doesn't find this very interesting? I mean it's just a coincidence that "buffalo" is a verb in American English and also a place nam

Am I the only one who just doesn't find this very interesting? I mean it's just a coincidence that "buffalo" is a verb in American English and also a place name, as well as an animal. I just don't think this leads anywhere interesting.

m4tthumphrey 3y ago
So if someone came up to you in at a party or any other social environment and said "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" and then walked off, your interest wouldn't be piqued?
- Flozzin 3y ago
  No, not really. People do all sorts of crap for all sorts of reasons. Some people are literally insane. Some people do things at your expense. Some people just like to amuse only themselves. And then throw drugs and alcohol in the mix, there isn't much reason to believe that people are always rational actors which have to be taken seriously.
technothrasher 3y ago
For somebody with a Cognitive Science degree like myself, the interesting place it leads is that it is a grammatically correct sentence which almost every native speaker who is unfamiliar with will claim is not. Why? If we can reason out that it is grammatically correct, but our built in grammar parser will evaluate it as incorrect, what is it we don't understand about the way our brain processes linguistic information?
wanderingstan 3y ago
It’s interesting for several reasons at least: - It shows “corner cases” in our own human languages where meaning is not clear even when a sentence is grammatically correct. (This possibility is perhaps more obvious to tech people, but a surprise to many) - It shows how understanding a sentence is so different from reading. When, with some aid, one finally can read the buffalo sentence and understand it, it’s amazing to realize how it “clicks”. As technothrasher said, this is interesting to those understanding how the brain works. - As others noted, reveals how much of human language is about defaults and convention, and NOT about parsing based in grammar. This was something that had to be learned; early thinkers sometimes assumed that the brain was just a parser. - For hackers, it’s interesting to find ways to “break” a human language while playing by the rules (grammar).

m4tthumphrey 3y ago

So if someone came up to you in at a party or any other social environment and said "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" and then walked off, your interest wouldn't be piqued?

Flozzin 3y ago
No, not really. People do all sorts of crap for all sorts of reasons. Some people are literally insane. Some people do things at your expense. Some people just like to amuse only themselves. And then throw drugs and alcohol in the mix, there isn't much reason to believe that people are always rational actors which have to be taken seriously.

technothrasher 3y ago

For somebody with a Cognitive Science degree like myself, the interesting place it leads is that it is a grammatically correct sentence which almost every native speaker who is unfamiliar with will claim is not. Why? If we can reason out that it is grammatically correct, but our built in grammar parser will evaluate it as incorrect, what is it we don't understand about the way our brain processes linguistic information?

wanderingstan 3y ago

It’s interesting for several reasons at least: - It shows “corner cases” in our own human languages where meaning is not clear even when a sentence is grammatically correct. (This possibility is perhaps more obvious to tech people, but a surprise to many) - It shows how understanding a sentence is so different from reading. When, with some aid, one finally can read the buffalo sentence and understand it, it’s amazing to realize how it “clicks”. As technothrasher said, this is interesting to those understanding how the brain works. - As others noted, reveals how much of human language is about defaults and convention, and NOT about parsing based in grammar. This was something that had to be learned; early thinkers sometimes assumed that the brain was just a parser. - For hackers, it’s interesting to find ways to “break” a human language while playing by the rules (grammar).