"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been known to exist since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, currently an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.[1] It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992.[2] It was also featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct. Sentences of this type, although not in such a refined form, have been known for a long time. A classical example is a proverb "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you".
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:
Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:
It may be revealing to read the sentence replacing all instances of Buffalo the animal with "people" and the verb buffalo with "intimidate." The sentence then reads:
Preserving the structure even closer, mapping "buffalo" (animal) onto "dog", "buffalo" (verb) onto "bite" and "Buffalo" (city) onto Tokyo, would yield 'Tokyo dogs Tokyo dogs bite bite Tokyo dogs', or 'Tokyo dogs, whom other Tokyo dogs bite, themselves bite Tokyo dogs'. This is the same sentence structure as 'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo'.
Other than the confusion caused by the homophones, the sentence is difficult to parse for several reasons:
It can be extended to:
...in which the subject and object of the central verb 'balance'.
Indeed, for any n ≥ 1, the sentence buffalon is grammatically correct.[3] The shortest is 'buffalo!', meaning either 'bully (someone)!', 'look, there are buffalo, here!' For n = 0 could be argued to be a valid garden path sentence; one's definition of 'sentence' may or may not include "" as a valid sentence. Rational sentences, however, generally include at least one word and thus are excluded for the preceding.
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