Thursday, April 14, 2005

fish fish fish fish fish

It's a well known linguists' paradigm -- the seemingly nonsensical string of words that can actually be parsed as a grammatical sentence.
Fish fish fish fish fish.
In other words, flounders that groupers eat hunt flounders.
Still don't get it? Think about the phrase "games people play" -- it's elliptical (the expected "that" is omitted) for "games that people play." Same thing for "fish fish fish" -- it's an elliptical noun phrase serving as the subject of the longer sentence. But be careful -- it works best when the first "fish" is the object of the third "fish" within the inner phrase structure...

There are many fun examples of this phenomenon -- write in with more!
(for some reason, most of them involve animals...)

  • Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.
  • Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. ("Buffalo" can be a place, an animal, and a verb. Look it up! If you still can't parse it, let us know.)
  • Geese geese goose goose geese.
  • Sheep fish goose fish sheep. (Whether it's actually possible to "fish sheep" is an open question in my book.)
  • Fish Fishkill fish fish kill fish. (Fishkill, NY acts as an adjectival modifier.)
  • Buffalo geese Fishkill dogfish fish kill Buffalo sheep.
  • Help help help help help. (Thank you, Dracubeth, for that worthy submission!)

the possibilities are nigh endless....in whimsy and ludicry!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

the general pattern's been done, but how about--help help help help help!

also a suitable comment after reading this entry.

Anonymous said...

fish... I finally parsed it during class today. Dashed impressive.

The only thing similar I've got is, unpunctuatedly: you while I had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on Dracubeth.

Anonymous said...

I have one that I remember from freshman-year Latin class, but I don't remember it totally. I think it's:

"Malo malo malo malo malo."

That is, "I'd rather [be] in a tree with an apple than a bad man in trouble." It's kind of a stretch, and the words are not technically the same (different vowel-lengths) but there you go: I beat you all in pudliness. I beat you all.

Anonymous said...

Bill: there's another one of those in French, but it only works when spoken -- a play on vers, vert, verre, etc.

Anonymous said...

Le ver vert va vers le verre vert.

The green worm goes towards green glass.