Interesting Stuff: Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

If you don’t know about this and like words, this is pretty neat. It’s a little trick written about by several linguists. To start, note that the word buffalo can be:

• a noun (the animal)
• an adjective (the city Buffalo)
• a verb (to bully or confuse)

The trick is that, using the rules of Chomsky’s generative grammar (including relative and embedded clauses) you can make a sentence with any number of instances of buffalo. Wikipedia has more and focuses on the standard 8 word example but we can build up to it. I’ve underlined the embedded clauses just to make the last few a little less confusing.

1. Buffalo! (Even this is a complete sentence if you take it as an order for you to go buffalo someone)
2. Buffalo buffalo (the animals of the buffalo species engage in bullying)
3. Buffalo buffalo buffalo (buffalo from the city Buffalo engage in bullying)
4. Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo (buffalo from Buffalo bully other buffalo)
5. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (buffalo from Buffalo bully other buffalo also from Buffalo)
6. Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo (the buffalo that are bullied by buffalo from Buffalo themselves bully other buffalo)
7. Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (the buffalo that are bullied by buffalo from Buffalo themselves bully other buffalo from Buffalo)
8. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (Buffalo from Buffalo who are bullied by Buffalo buffalo themselves bully other buffalo from Buffalo)

Try keeping that whole last sentence in your head! Or the parse tree above might help – NP means noun phrase, VP means verb phrase.