[slurgfest]

As English, this stuff is totally incomprehensible and unusable. Absolutely nothing is conveyed to actual human English speakers by saying the word 'buffalo' 400 times in a row.

If it is 'grammatical' then it is grammatical by virtue of conforming to some idealized grammar. But when this grammar is so far off not just from anything people say, but anything they can actually understand, it really only means that the idea that this grammar models real English has been reduced to total absurdity.

[gruseom]

They're tricks, but they're far from incomprehensible. In my experience, both with this sentence and the buffalo one, there's a certain mental click when one "gets it", after which the sentence makes sense and one can "feel" its grammatical structure. It's a curious and rather Chomskyan experience. Before that, of course, the notion that such a string of words might mean anything is absurd. "Getting it" is much like those 3D visual puzzles where at first you see only a noise pattern, but when you hold it at the right distance and let your eyes refocus a certain way, a picture leaps out at you.

[jfarmer]

Don't take it too literally. It's meant as a kind of linguistic koan to illustrate the concept of prosody.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)

Consider the difference in how one says

    He ate that

vs

    He ate that?

That's prosody. The difference in meaning isn't a consequence of the presence of the question mark, although that's what people think of as "grammatical." The presence of the question mark and the difference in meaning are both consequences of the prosodic differences between the two sentences.

This shows one of many challenges inherent computational linguistics: "the written word" only encapsulates a small part of what it means to "speak English" or "understand English."

As a nice benefit, it makes the sort of grammarian who obsesses over the written word look (rightly) like they're missing the forest for the trees.

[tspiteri]

And further to that, there is a difference between "He ate that?" (He did what to that?) and "He ate that?" (He ate what?)

[Dylan16807]

While you have a point in there, some things are still missing. In my opinion the buffalo sentence doesn't have enough prosody to ever make the verbal version intelligible without explanation. The sentence in the OP does, but it's also missing mandatory punctuation. Punctuation conveys a solid fraction of the information prosody does, and sometimes even contains information prosody doesn't.

[czr80]

Actually, I find it perfectly comprehensible when said aloud with the right emphasis and pacing - it's only difficult to understand when written down with no punctuation.

[simonster]

You may also be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence, which has some sentences that are clearly grammatical but not what they seem at first glance.

[tjr]

I'm not convinced this one is even grammatical. At minimum, omitting the semicolon should make it a run-on sentence.

[philwelch]

The trick to all of these sentences is to omit otherwise necessary punctuation. The rare exceptions are sentences describing recursive concepts. For instance, if you have a radar detector, the police will catch you because they have a radar detector detector, which makes it imperative that you own a radar detector detector detector.

Here's another example: who polices the police? If there were any one agency in charge of that, certainly we would call them the police police. But who polices the police police? Clearly, the police police police police the police police.

[vacri]

The article title is ungrammatical without correct punctuation. With correct punctuation, it's fine - and it is, after all, talking directly about an error in the very grammatical construct it is highlighting. It's a perfectly natural sentence that could easily come about in normal discussion.

The 'buffalo' one is just nonsensical - the word 'buffalo' just isn't used that way, and even with punctuation, needs to be separately explained for people to understand it - even if they are aware of the regional dialect that uses the word 'buffalo' as a verb.

[pippy]

If English was a workable language, English majors would have nothing to base their theses on. The 'had had had' exercise highlights the absurd nature of English. This philosophy on English is why it stopped evolving after its peak - post English after the death of the worlds greatest playwright Shakespeare (who wrote phonetically, may I add).

On the other hand it does give an insight into syntax trees and parsing.

[vacri]

Every language has absurdities. Genders for non-gendered things is one example.

What's really absurd about English is the contempt for diacritical marks. Other languages give you a clue as to how the word is pronounced, whereas in English, if I write 'wind', you don't know if I'm talking about air blowing or charging a mechanical clock unless you have context - which may come later in the sentence.