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The word buffalo may refer to an animal but has other meanings as well.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a grammatically valid sentence used as an example of how homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct, but is known to have been around before February 1992 when it was posted to Linguist List by William J. Rapaport.

Sentences of this type, although not in such a refined form, have been known for a long time. Classical examples are a proverb "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you" and a joke, in which a conductor, when asked how long will the train stay at the station, answered "From two to two to two two".

Sentence construction

The sentence uses three possible meanings of the word "buffalo":

  1. An American Bison, water buffalo, white buffalo, or African buffalo
  2. Buffalo, New York, the second-largest city in the state of New York
  3. A verb meaning to confuse, deceive, or intimidate

Using these definitions, the sentence could be rewritten:

Buffalo bison Buffalo bison intimidate intimidate Buffalo bison.

Other than the obvious confusion caused by the homophones, the sentence is difficult to parse for several reasons:

  1. The use of "buffalo" as a verb is not particularly common
  2. The removal of syntactically significant words ("the", "that", etc.) to such a degree is not a common linguistic approach
  3. The omission of punctuation makes it difficult to read the flow of the sentence
  4. The example has the structure of a garden path sentence, i.e., the sentence that cannot be parsed by reading one word at a time without backtracking.
  5. The length of the sentence reaches the limitations of human ability to parse structure and meaning

References

  1. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct p210. ISBN 0060958332.
  2. Rapaport, William J. 19 February 1992. "Message 1: Re: 3.154 Parsing Challenges". Accessed 14 September 2006.

External links

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