For some reason this old saying popped into my head reading that. I know it's not related but:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
"Fruit flies like a banana" is arguably the quintessential example of ambiguity in English grammar. It shows that the grammatical structure of a sentence (which words are nouns, which are verbs, etc.) cannot be reliably recovered even if we know the meaning and possible grammatical categories of every word.
Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound:
(Fruit) (flies) (like a banana)
(Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)
To decide which meaning was likely intended, the listener needs to make a value judgement about the speaker, based on detailed knowledge of the everyday world.
Even spoken aloud, there's a natural-sounding stress pattern that is ambiguous. Love it.
Would marking compound words resolve this? As in germanic togetherwriting of things that form one whole, as in English' noun-that-they-modify-preceding adjectives, or as in some other language: some way of signaling this?
It would definitely help with written English, but I can't see it helping with spoken. (Is there some rule in German that disambiguates togetherwritten nouns when spoken?)
I actually wrote about speech but thought it distracted from the question and removed it again
No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know
As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences
There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation
Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?
The only pattern I know for sure is that compound words in English tend to begin their lives in hyphenated form (news-paper, life-style, e-mail) and then the hyphen gradually disappears over time. Old enough newspapers still show these words with hyphens in.
I think the hyphen removal follows the typical speech pattern in which the syllables are rushed together just like the syllables of other words, but I'm not sure.
I assume stuff like this is why some languages or script can never be deciphered
My favorite part about that quote is the broken symmetry between the double meaning of the second sentence and the single meaning of the first.
It begs one to consider the possibility of little “time flies” snacking on arrows. Which I guess completes the square?
Gosh, after all those years I've only just realized the double meaning of "fruit flies". Thanks!
Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.
This is hilarious. I never thought of a flying banana and now I can't un-see it.
I think this is an example of a Garden Path Sentence[0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence?wprov=sfl...