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Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/hackernews@derp.foo
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[–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

What's interesting for me about this sort of phenomenon is that it relies on relative lack of morphological marks. It's somewhat easy to pull it off in English or Mandarin, but in Latin? Good luck. I'll demonstrate it borrowing the English words but conjugating/declining them natively:

  • buffali Buffali buffalati a buffalis Buffali buffalos Buffali buffalant.
  • animal.NOM city.GEN verb.PASS.NOM PREP animal.ABL city.GEN animal.ACC city.GEN verb.ACT.PRES.IND

(Ante: scio, scio, latine animalis est "bubalus" cum B, sed exemplum est melior cum FF.)

You could mess a bit with the word order to make it a bit clearer, or switch the passive with a subordinate like English does (but then "qui" is obligatory, and it helps a lot) but note how the endings disambiguate what's what, even with the syncretism (genitive singular and nominative plural being usually identical).

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Nobody understands what you're saying

    You could just be making that all up

    Nobody would be able to call you out

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    If I were to make this shit up, people could call me out three ways.

    One of them is that I'm likely not the only Latin speaker in Lemmy. (si aliquis hic latine loquitur, dic "aue"!)

    The second one is that you could cross-check what I wrote there, with some actual Latin nouns and verbs. Like this or like this. EDIT: specially given that I glossed the cases and conjugations being used.

    But the third and most important is that what I'm saying is not exclusive to Latin. I'm exemplifying it with Latin because of familiarity, but you could use Polish or Russian or Quechua or Turkish or MSA (not sure on local varieties) to the same effect. (My Polish doesn't go past singing Byłam Różą when drunk, so... I'm not even trying.)

    So don't confuse "I couldn't do it" with "Nobody would be able to".

    In fact, I think that English allowing this sort of ambiguity is not the rule. It's the result of the language being highly isolating. I don't expect this to appear on more fusional and agglutinative languages. EDIT: perhaps not surprisingly the other commonly mentioned example of the same phenomenon is from another highly isolating language.

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