Things do evolve! There were badgers .. and mushrooms ..
http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/ Anand Manikutty [01/06/11 02:23 -0700]:
There has been a discussion on the Internets on "Buffalo Buffalo ..." ever since Paul Krugman posted about the sentence on his New York Times blog. Brad DeLong posted about it also. Brad DeLong got it up to 10 buffalo, but more is possible. This is a matter of international significance and so must be covered on this here list. My major concern with extending the Buffalo sentence ad infinitum (specifically, to infinitely many instances of the word "buffalo") is that that since they are talking about a real city, and real animals, there may be issues of emptiness. The problem of emptiness is as follows. Now, the idea in forming these large sentences is that the word buffalo is both a plural noun as well as a transitive verb. Furthermore, it is also a place name. Now, the set of Buffalo buffalo that buffalo other buffalo may be small. The set of Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo may be even smaller. So, as you can see, there may be no buffalo left pretty soon. So, while it may be theoretically possible to make that sentence as long as you like, there may not be any members of the set left to utilize and so saying that the members of this empty set do something is kind of pointless. Not to worry. Because there is fish. And there is also a fictional town called Fish (see linked here : http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Town-Called-FISH---By-the-MLM-Insider&id=1315616). Now to continue that story : the great thing about these fish from the town called Fish is - well, one, they are Fish fish; and two, they can even look for other swimming creatures with fins (i.e.) they can fish. So. Fish fish fish fish. (that is, fish from the town of Fish fish (for) fish). To build up an arbitrarily large sentence involving fish, I give you the following grammar: Sentence -> NX V [N_that_is_the_name_of_a_place] N NX -> N NX V | N N V Here, N = fish as a noun V = fish as a verb N_that_is_the_name_of_a_place = Fish, the town NX = a grammar construct that is used to simply create an arbitrarily large sentence. Note that N_that_is_the_name_of_a_place is optional. You can use this to generate Fish^N for any N larger than 4. For N smaller than 5, well, you can easily see that those are perfectly valid sentences too. That should take care of everything. Anand == P.S. A sample construct of this grammar is the sentence below : fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Noun) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) fish(Verb) Fish fish(Noun) P.P.S. More here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/433
