Tuesday, May 14, 2013

English grammar fun with "buffalo"

I stumbled upon this on Reddit, and as a pure grammatical ice-breaker (to an advanced crowd), it could definitely stir up some fun discussion.

From Wikipedia:

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically valid sentence in American English, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. [...]

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are
Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives:
Buffaloa buffalon Buffaloa buffalon buffalov buffalov Buffaloa buffalon."