Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

24 min read Original article ↗
  • In 1972, I was a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University. One of my professors, John Tienson (now [2006] at the University of Memphis), in a course on Philosophy of Language, gave the following example of a grammatical sentence:
      Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.

    The syntax is the same as that of

      Mice [that] cats chase eat cheese.

    Several of us students found the plural "-s" endings to lack a certain aesthetic simplicity, and we searched for a better word. I came up with

      Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

    I.e., buffalo who are buffaloed by other buffalo themselves buffalo still other buffalo.

    However, my fellow graduate students and I were not satisfied. So I concocted:

      Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

    The syntax of the following sentence is close to the previous one:

      Boston mice [that] Boston cats "Boston-chase" "Boston-eat" Boston cheese.

    I.e., mice who are in Boston, and who are chased (in a way unique to Boston) by cats who are in Boston, eat (in a way unique to Boston) cheese that comes from Boston.

    So, buffalo who live in Buffalo (e.g., at the Buffalo Zoo, which does, indeed, have buffalo), and who are buffaloed (in a way unique to Buffalo) by other buffalo from Buffalo, themselves buffalo (in the way unique to Buffalo) still other buffalo from Buffalo.

  • In 1976, I used both Buffalo sentences in philosophy courses at State University of New York at Fredonia. Both native and non-native speakers of English who heard it, of course, never ceased to be amazed. Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me that a string of 5 occurrences of the same word could be a grammatical, even meaningful (though hardly "acceptable"), sentence.
  • In the early 1980s, several graduate students in the Department of Computer Science at State University of New York at Buffalo (where I now teach) noted that the sentence can be extended indefinitely by continued embeddings and NP-modifications.

    I used the following question on AI and computational linguistics exams:

      "Write a grammar, in any formalism, that accepts all of the following infinite sequence of sentences. (Ignore all words in parentheses, which I have put in only in order to clarify the syntax of the sentences.)
      1. Mice (that) cats chase eat cheese.
      2. Dogs (that) dogs dog dog dogs.\footnote{To dog someone or something is to follow that person or thing.}
      3. Buffalo (that) buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.\footnote{Note: To buffalo someone or something is to bewilder or overawe that person or thing, and one acceptable plural of the noun "buffalo" is "buffalo".}
      4. Small mice (that) large cats quickly chase slowly eat green cheese.
      5. Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
      6. Mice (that) cats (that) dogs bother chase eat cheese (that) rats refuse.
      7. Buffalo (that) buffalo (that) buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo (that) buffalo buffalo.

      — etc. —
      I.e., each NP can be modified by an NP-V combination."
  • In the late 1980s/early 1990s, other students noted that the original 5-word sentence is ambiguous! In fact, one of the other people who claims to have heard it from someone other than me (in fact, as I recall, he attributed it to Daniel C. Dennett) thinks that it is parallel to:
      Boston cats chase Boston mice.

    (though the capitalization is a bit off for that). Another of my students notes that the 10-word version is also ambiguous, along the lines of this:

      Boston cats Boston-chase Boston mice [that] Boston rats Boston-eat.
  • In 1994, Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994, pp. 209-210) cited:
      "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

    parsed as meaning that "(The) Buffalo buffalo [i.e., the buffalo who live in Buffalo] (that) [other] Buffalo buffalo (often) buffalo (in turn) buffalo other Buffalo buffalo", and attributed it to his student Annie Senghas.

    I had an email exchange with Pinker about the above history. Pinker responded as follows:

      "Date: Thu, 17 Feb 94 18:36:46 EST
      From: Steve Pinker
      To: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu
      Subject: Re: Buffalo buffalo ...

      Dear William,

      That's terrific! Thanks for letting me know that history, and if I use the example again, I will surely give you priority. (I believe it was independently invented by Annie -- I checked specifically with her when someone else had told me that she may have borrowed it.) I might balk a bit at the verb "to Buffalo-buffalo" as verb-compounding is fairly rare and stilted in spoken English, but the set of examples is certainly enlightening.

      Thanks for letting me know about the review, and about your priority in the example.

      Sincerely,
      Steve Pinker"

    I replied as follows:

      "Date: Fri, 18 Feb 1994 09:02:46 -0500
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu, steve@psyche.mit.edu
      Subject: Re: Buffalo buffalo ...

      Steve-

      Yes, I also balk at the compound verb "to Buffalo buffalo", but I couldn't resist. My model was the Tennesee waltz; presumably, when one dances it, one could be said to be Tennessee-waltzing, no?"

  • In 1995, I alerted Pinker to another source:
      "Date: Fri, 14 Apr 1995 15:09:38 -0400
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: STEVE@PSYCHE.MIT.EDU
      Subject: Buffalo sentences

      Steve-

      Remember the email exchange we had last summer about Buffalo sentences?

      Well, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig's new AI text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, claims that Barton, Berwick, and Ristad came up with it. The exact reference is:

      Barton, G. Edward, Jr.; Berwick, Robert C.; & Ristad, Eric Sven (1987), Computational Complexity and Natural Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Ch. 3, Sect. 3.4, esp. p. 100.

      Nonetheless (I checked my records), I independently devised it in 1972 and have been using it in lectures since 1976. So, possibly there were 3 independent discoveries: mine, your student Annie, and Barton/Berwick/Ristad. In any case, I'm going to check with Berwick (but you're closer; you might check, too, if you're interested).

      -Bill"

    Pinker replied:

      "Date: Thu, 27 Apr 95 11:59:39 EDT
      From: Steve Pinker
      To: "William J. Rapaport"
      Subject: more on Buffalo yet

      Thanks! If the book ever goes into a second edition, I will surely bring this all up.

      Best,
      Steve"

  • I wrote to Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig concerning exercise 22.8 in the first edition of their Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995):
      "From rapaport Fri Apr 14 11:37:20 1995
      To: aima-bug@cs.berkeley.edu
      Subject: Buffalo sentence

      OK guys; it was bad enough that Steve Pinker, in his The Language Ins tinct, claimed that one of his grad students discovered/invented:

        Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo

      but now *you* claim, without citation, that Barton, Berwick, and Ristad came up with it (p. 690). Can you document that?

      It's possible that Pinker's student came up with it independently, but I can document that I devised it in 1972. Here's the story:

      In 1972, I took a grad course in philosophy of language from John Tienson at Indiana University. In that course, he presented the sentence:

        Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.

      which is grammatical and meaningful, if not acceptable, with no punctuation changes, having, of course, the same syntactic structure as:

        Mice cats chase eat cheese.

      Finding the "-s" morpheme unaesthetic, several of us grad students sought something better.

        Fish fish fish fish fish

      doesn't quite hack it, since "fish" requires an indirect object: one fishes *for* something. At that point, I came up with the Buffalo sentence.

      I began using it in courses at SUNY Fredonia in 1976. One of the students in my first course there is now an ESL teacher in ... Buffalo, of course, and uses it in his classes.

      I publicized it first to the SUNY Buffalo linguistics department that year, and then gave it more celebrity at ACL-88, when I put a parse tree for it in the registration packet (I was the local arrangements coordinator) and used an overhead transparency of it during my welcoming remarks. And a version of your problem 22.8 appeared as a question on our department's Graduate Qualifying Exam in 1988.

      Since then, I've heard others claim it, but with the less interesting reading of the form Adj N V Adj N (like your "Dallas cattle..." sentence).

      My favorite version requires the introduction not only of the modifier "Buffalo" for the animal (Buffalo buffalo are the ones in the Buffalo zoo), but also for the verb "to buffalo": You see, the Buffalo buffalo's style of buffaloing other buffalo is *so* unique that, like Tennessee waltzing, it's called Buffalo buffaloing, so:

        Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

      Bottom line: When/where did Barton et al. devise it? "

    To which Norvig replied:

      "From: Peter Norvig
      Date: Fri, 14 Apr 95 10:26:47 PDT
      To: rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU
      Subject: Re: Buffalo sentence

      I did no research at all to determine the origins of the buffalo sentence; I originially [sic] wrote the exercise without any attribution; then I saw a second-hand citation (either in [Michael A.] Covington's NL and Prolog book or James Allen's 2nd edition, I think) and put it in. Next week, when I get back from a trip, I'll put your story up in the "Clarifications" section of the web pages, and schedule a correction for the next printing of the book.

      Being authoritative and finding original sources is important to us, so I'm glad you sent this note. We just didn't have time to do it completely, especially in exercises and the like.

      -Peter"

    They did, indeed, update the information; it now appears as Exercise 22.12 in Russell & Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2003): 833.

  • I also communicated with Michael Covington, who cites it in one of his books:
      Date: Fri, 14 Apr 1995 14:59:56 -0400
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: aima-bug@cs.berkeley.edu
      Subject: Buffalo sentences
      Cc: MCOVINGT@uga.cc.uga.edu, rapaport

      Here's *a* source:

      Barton, G. Edward, Jr.; Berwick, Robert C.; & Ristad, Eric Sven (1987), Computational Complexity and Natural Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Ch. 3, Sect. 3.4, esp. p. 100.

      They give an analysis of Buffalo sentences, plus others, like:

        Police police police police police

      Now I need to contact them to find out where *they* got it from :-)

      -Bill"

    Covington replied:

      "Date: Fri, 14 Apr 95 17:40:39 EDT
      From: Michael Covington
      Subject: Re: Buffalo
      To: "William J. Rapaport"

      I got it from Barton, Berwick, and Ristad, but have a dim recollection of having heard it somewhere before that. In citing them I did not mean to indicate that they were the definite originators.

      - Michael A. Covington, Assc. Director mcovingt@ai.uga.edu -
      - Artificial Intelligence Center University of Georgia -
      - Athens, Georgia 30602-7415 U.S.A. phone 706 542-0358 -

    and followed up:

      Date: Thu, 20 Apr 95 09:35:44 EDT
      From: Michael Covington
      Subject: Re: Buffalo sentences
      To: "William J. Rapaport"

      One more place to look: Dover Publications publishes a reprint of a late 19th century book called "Oddities and Curiosities of Language and Literature" or something like that. If the Buffalo-sentence (or the police sentence, etc.) was current in Victorian times, it will be there.

      [note added 9/17/06 by Rapaport: I looked in this book and did not find any sentence like it]

      Here's a sentence from H. P. V. Nunn's _Elements of New Testament Greek_ (1951, originally published 1916):

        "He said that that that that man said was false."
  • And finally I contacted Berwick:
      "Date: Fri, 14 Apr 1995 15:22:26 -0400
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: BERWICK@AI.MIT.EDU
      Subject: Buffalo sentences

      Dear Professor Berwick:

      I'm trying to track down the various origins of the Buffalo sentences that you discuss in your book with Barton and Ristad.

      Here's my version of the history:

      1. In 1972, I took a graduate course in Philosophy of Language with John Tienson at Indiana University. He gave the sentence:

        Dogs dogs dog dog dogs

      as an example of a syntactically and sematically correct sentence that was difficult for humans to parse without already understanding it (along the lines of "mice cats chase eat cheese"). My fellow grads and I tried to come up with a more aesthetically pleasing sentence without the -s plural marker. We rejected "fish fish fish fish fish" since one normally fishes *for* something. I then devised "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo". Not being satisfied, I considered the buffalo in the Buffalo zoo (the Buffalo buffalo) and their unique way of buffaloing the other Buffalo buffalo, so unique that, like Tennessee waltzing, it's called Buffalo buffaloing, whence:

        Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

      2. Since 1976, I have been using those sentences in my courses at SUNY Buffalo.

      3. Around 1976 or shortly thereafter, I told the SUNY Buffalo Linguistics Dept. about them

      4. In 1988, when I was the local arrangements coordinator for ACL-88, I put a parse tree for the simpler sentence (what you call "Buffalo^5") in the registration packet, and had an overhead transparency of it in my welcoming remarks. That same year, I also put it on our department's AI Ph.D. qualifying exam.

      5. A few years ago, someone told me they heard it at a conference, possibly attributed to Dan Dennett (or one of his students), but giving the syntactic analysis as NP + V + NP.

      6. Then I read Steven Pinker's new book, The Language Instinct, in which he attributes it to a student of his.

      7. I then came across a reference, attributing it to you (and Barton and Ristad) in Russell and Norvig's new AI text (AI: A Modern Approach), though they don't give the reference to your book.

      Now, given that I *know* that I came up with it myself, and giving the benefit of the doubt to Pinker's student, my question is: where did you folks get it from (and when)?

      Thanks for any enlightenment you can give me on this.

      -Bill Rapaport"

    Berwick replied:

    I replied:

      Date: Thu, 20 Apr 1995 09:01:27 -0400
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: berwick@ai.mit.edu, rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu
      Subject: Re: buffaloes, etc.

      Bob-

      Thanks much for the info on buffalo! So if you heard it before 1972, and I know I came up with it on my own, that means that at least 2 native speakers of English discovered this odd sentence--odd not only because of its opaque surface syntax vis-a-vis its deep syntax, but odd also because of its lexicon--independently, which makes one wonder about how odd it is after all! :-)

      [rest of message, on the other topic, deleted]

      -Bill

  • And, per Berwick's suggestion, I corresponded with de Marcken:
      From: cgdemarc@ai.mit.edu (Carl de Marcken)
      Date: Thu, 20 Apr 95 13:40:07 EDT
      To: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu
      Cc: berwick@ai.mit.edu, cgdemarc@ai.mit.edu
      Subject: Re: buffalo sentences

      Bill,

      I first heard of the Buffalo sentences from Bob, who also mentions in his book "French" and "police". I might add "char" to the list. (It would be easy enough to do a search for more appropriate words).

      I actually use the sentences occasionally to verify performance of parsing systems- to make sure they conform to expected polynomial parsing times. And I have found over the years that I can produce and analyze the sentences pretty easily.

      In the GSB message below (I send out a humorous message to a large mailing list at the AI lab here every Friday inviting everyone to an afternoon beer bash), I mention the Buffalo sentences and give a small grammar. I did once calculate the largest eigenvalue of the matrix for the grammar, which turned out to be about 1.33 (I did it by hand so it might not be correct), but later noticed that I should have added a rule to handle the use of Buffalo, the city, as the object of a verb: "I like Buffalo", "Gnus fool Buffalo", "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo". Anyway, the message is below and I even append a short lisp program the counts buffalo sentences of length n exactly (but not using the rule just mentioned).

      Thank you (and John Tienson and ...) for the sentences. They've provided amusement to me for a number of years, and I even considered submitting a silly ACL or LI squib about them. I never did, largely because I had no idea who invented them. But if you're interested...

      Carl

      To: all-ai
      Subject: GSB 5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 16, seventh floor playroom
      --text follows this line--

      Consider, for the sake of posterity, the word "Buffalo". The word in isolation can take on at least one of three possible senses:

        Buffalo [Noun] ;; As in, Buffalo the animals that are not gnu.
        Buffalo [City] ;; As in, Buffalo the city that is not Boston.
        Buffalo [Verb] ;; As in, to bewilder or to baffle.

      Now, gedanken about a string of N consecutive occurrences of the word Buffalo. A grammar that seeks to describe the variety of meaningful interpretations for this string must generate at least the interpretations that the following context-free rules do:

        Root -> NounPhrase | Sentence
        NounPhrase -> NBar [ Sent/NP ] ;; "Badgers" or "Beavers [that] Bovine bang"
        Sentence -> NounPhrase VerbPhrase ;; "Brontosaurus beat Boas"
        NBar -> [ City ] Noun ;; "Bison" or "Boston Butterclams"
        VerbPhrase -> Verb [ NounPhrase ] ;; "{Bowfin} break [ Braconid ]"
        Sent/NP -> NounPhrase VP/NP ;; "{Bumblebees that} Bushtit bedeck"
        VP/NP -> Verb ;; "{Beagles that Beetles} belay"

      So, "BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO" can mean something analogous to

        "Bangor behemoths blame Brighton bats" or
        "Bigfoots bedazzle birds [that] bears besmirtch" or
        "Bobolinks [that] bharal betray beshrew biflagelates" or
        "Bombay billfish [that] bighorn bind bivy" or
        "Billygoats [that] Bangkok bivalves bifurcate bite" or
        "Bedford broncos [that] Bridgewater bedbugs block" or
        "Beasts [that] beluga [that] bluefish blight bewitch"

        Indeed, as N -> infinity, the number of interpretations for Buffalo^N is approximately proportional to 1.3312^N. For 200 Buffalos there are 121,030,872,213,055,159,681,184,485 easily understood interpretations.

        To find out more about buffalo, police, char, and the French join us at this week's

        G I R L S C O U T B E N E F I T

        at 5:30 p.m. Friday in the seventh floor playroom. Beer, root beer, and tales from the dark side of linguistics will be in plentiful supply.

        ----------- 

        (defun print-buffalo (n &optional upper)
  (if upper
      (progn
	(format t "Buffalos  Sentences~%")
	(loop for i from n to upper
	      do (format t "~D~10T~D~%" i (buffalo i))))
      (print (buffalo n)))
  (values))

(defun buffalo (n)
  (+ (np n) (s n)))

(defun np (n)
  (if (<= n 3)
      1
      (+ (np (- n 2))
	 (np (- n 3)))))

(defun np (n)
  (flet ((it (n i r1 r2 r3)
	   (if (= n i)
	       r1
	       (it n (+ 1 i) (+ r2 r3) r1 r2))))
    (if (<= n 3)
	1
	(it n 4 2 1 1))))

(defun s (n)
  (cond ((< n 2)
	 0)
	((= n 2)
	 1)
	(t
	 (+ (np (- n 1))
	    (loop for i from 1 to (- n 2)
		  summing (* (np i)
			     (np (- n i 1))))))))
  • More recently, I received this message:
      Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 04:26:40 -0500
      To: rapaport@cse.Buffalo.EDU
      From: George Neuner
      Subject: "buffalo" ad nauseam

      Dear Professor Rapaport,

      There is an ongoing discussion of "punning" in comp.lang.lisp which refers to your 1992 article on parsing challenges ( http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-175.html ).

      I don't follow how the example sentence, which contains ten uses of the word "buffalo", proceeds from the explanatory text. Using the rules of English grammar and without changing word form, the longest sentence I can construct contains only six uses: 

               Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
           adj      n      adv      v      adj      n
       |-- subject --| |--- verb ----| |-- object ---|

      I would greatly appreciate elaboration of the additional use cases in the example sentence.

      Additionally, I don't see how the dance reference is applicable. With respect to the "buffalo" example, the equivalent, unmodified form, "Tennessee Waltz Tennessee Waltz", is not a proper English sentence. I am not a dance devotee, but accepting your premise that the term denotes both form and method, the minimally correct English sentence requires addition of the definitive article "the", as in:

        Tennessee Waltz the Tennessee Waltz.

      Incidentally, I spent a good part of my childhood in Buffalo and much of my family is still in the area. I have seen the bison in the zoo many times, but have never before heard that their behavior is so peculiarly different as to have its own descriptive term.

      Thank you for any time you deign to spare to this note.

      Very truly yours,
      George Neuner

      MS.CS. Northeastern University - Programming Languages & Operating Systems
      Undergraduate SWE test score: 754
      Vocal advocate of remedial grammar for exposed media employees.
      Currently unemployed.

    ...to which I replied:

      Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 07:50:40 -0500 (EST)
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: gneuner2@comcast.net, rapaport@cse.Buffalo.EDU
      Subject: Re: "buffalo" ad nauseam

      George:

      Thanks for your interest in {B|b}uffalo :-)

      The sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." is actually ambiguous with both your reading, where "Buffalo buffalo" is an Adj+N phrase as subject, "buffalo" is the verb, and "[B]uffalo buffalo" is a miscapitalized Adj+N phrase as direct object. However, the reading I prefer, and which is historically more accurate, has essentially the same syntactic structure as "Mice cats chase eat cheese": the first "buffalo" is the subject; the next "buffalo buffalo" is a relative clause (with omitted "that") whose structure is N+V; and the final "buffalo buffalo" is a VP (=V+N) containing the predicate of the sentence. So, paraphrased, it becomes: Buffalo that (other) buffalo buffalo, themselves buffalo yet other buffalo. Imagine 3 buffalo in a row, each "buffaloing" the one in front of it.

      The modification you question--which is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but then English admits of such stretches (as the computer scientist Alan Perlis said: in English, any noun can be verbed)--involves prefixing each word in the original sentence with the adjective "Buffalo", referring to the name of your former and my fair city, with the same grammatical structure as above, but with the (humorous) interpretation that the buffalo who live in the Buffalo Zoo, viz., the Buffalo buffalo, not only buffalo the other buffalo in the zoo, but do so in a way unique to Buffalo, called "Buffalo buffaloing", and, moreover, they themselves are buffaloed in that way, viz., Buffalo buffaloing, by other Buffalo buffalo in the zoo:

        [Note added 10/5/2012: Thanks to reader Abdullah A. Khan, 10/5/12, who noticed that I was missing a couple of "buffalo"s, which I've now corrected]

        Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

      Other variations are possible.

      Incidentally, to update and correct the history of the original, 5-word sentence, although I did create the sentence as I said in my LINGUIST posting, I have since learned that an earlier incarnation (invocation?) of it occurs in a book by Robert Berwick (possibly Computational Complexity and Natural Language--I'm at home and don't have the exact reference), which also cites "police police police police police". Berwick tells me that he first heard the sentence growing up in NYC in the 1950s, as I recall. There may be a brief discussion of this in the Russell & Norvig AI text.

      As for Tennesee waltzing, all I meant was to give a parallel construction to "Buffalo buffaloing"; I did not intend that there was a similar sentence, since, as you rightly note, waltzes don't waltz, nor is waltzing a transitive verb.

      -Bill Rapaport

    ... to which Neuner replied:

      Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 09:05:52 -0500
      To: "William J. Rapaport"
      From: George Neuner
      Subject: Re: "buffalo" ad nauseam

      Dear Professor Rapaport,

      I appreciate very much your thorough explanation of the "buffalo" example. It occurred to me that "buffalo" is not a transitive verb, but I failed to recognize the appositive form and so the sentence failed to parse beyond six buffalos. It's a splendid example of both the fluidity of English and the general difficulty in parsing natural language - even for native readers.

      I suspect it would also help not to read news in the middle of the night 8-)

      Thanks again,
      George Neuner

    I further inquired:

      Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:39:09 -0500 (EST)
      From: "William J. Rapaport"
      To: gneuner2@comcast.net
      Subject: reference to me on comp.lang.lisp

      George:

      You wrote:

      >There is an ongoing discussion of "punning" in comp.lang.lisp which refers
      >to your 1992 article on parsing challenges (
      >http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-175.html ).

      Can you give me a pointer to the comp.lang.lisp article that cites this?

      Thanks.

      -Bill

    ... and received this reply:

      Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 16:21:58 -0500
      To: "William J. Rapaport"
      From: George Neuner
      Subject: Re: reference to me on comp.lang.lisp

      Hi Professor,

      Buffalos became a very popular topic. There are discrepancies between the lists on Google and on my news server - the postings don't quite match up.

      AFAICT, this article by Ray Dillinger contains the first reference to you personally. Buffalos and other examples appeared earlier.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=m3ad2ex2qh.fsf%40javamonkey.co

      The thread starts at:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=873c85kdee.fsf%40g.mccaughan.ntlworld.com&prev=/groups%3Fdq%3D%26num%3D25%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dcomp.lang.lisp%26start%3D50

      and continues at:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=pcoptb88ody.fsf%40thoth.math.ntnu.no&prev=/groups%3Fdq%3D%26num%3D25%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dcomp.lang.lisp%26start%3D25

      and becomes ridiculous here:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=m3vfl05psp.fsf%40banff.eder.de&prev=/groups%3Fdq%3D%26num%3D25%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dcomp.lang.lisp%26start%3D25

      YMMV,
      George

  • Even more recently, I received this: 
      From: thelewolfs@comcast.net
To: rapaport@cse.Buffalo.EDU
Subject: Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 17:47:46 +0000

Hello,

This is in reference to your website on the creation of the "Buffalo
Buffalo" sentence.

Actually, this appears earlier than your 1972 claim.  Dmitri A.
Borgmann's classic book, "Beyond Language--Adventures in Word and
Thought," has a copyright date of 1967; it was published by Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York.  (I am sure that you are aware that the late
Dmitri Borgmann was the founder of Word Ways, the Journal of
Recreational Linguistics.)

I refer to the "Problems" section on pp.70-71 ("Repetitive Homonymy"),
in which Borgmann challenges the reader to devise an English homonymic
sentence.  On page 190 ("Resolutions"), one of the examples given is
"BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO."  Borgmann goes on to say:  "For
anyone puzzled by this statement, we elaborate:  'Wild oxen (roaming
the streets) of Buffalo, New York bewilder (visiting) North Carolina
coast dwellers.'"

Sincerely,

Shirley Wolf
17016 Freedom Way
Rockville, MD  20853

    A copy of the relevant pages of Borgmann's book is available from me; send email to the address below.

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    Tristan Miller reminds me (see letter below) that the correct page number is 290, not 190

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    And here is some history about an even earlier occurrence of a "Buffalo" sentence: 
      Subject: Another antedated "buffalo"
From: Tristan Miller 

Date: 12/7/14 11:38 AM
To: William J. Rapaport 

Dear Prof. Rapaport,

I'm writing concerning your history of the sentence "Buffalo buffalo 
buffalo buffalo buffalo" at 
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/buffalobuffalo.html.

The earliest version you list on that page is from Dmitri Borgmann's book 
Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought (Charles Scribner's Sons, 
1967).  It may interest you to know that, while this may be the earliest
known *published* example, it is not the earliest *written* one.

According to former Word Ways editor A. Ross Eckler, Jr., the sentence 
appears in the original manuscript for Borgmann's previous book, Language 
on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities (Charles Scribner's Sons, 
1965).  However, the entire chapter containing it, "The Sound of Language", 
was cut by the editor at Scribner's, presumably to sharpen the focus of the 
book on letter-play.  Borgmann recycled some of the excised material, 
including the "buffalo" sentence, in his subsequent book.

Eckler's examination of Borgmann's original manuscript is covered in the
following Word Ways article, which is free to view online at the Butler
University Digital Commons:

A. Ross Eckler, Jr.  "The Borgmann Apocrypha".  Word Ways: The Journal of 
Recreational Linguistics, 38(4):258-260, November 2005.  
http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5016&context=wordways

Sincerely,
Tristan Miller

P.S. -- In your history, there is a small but significant typo in the 
Borgmann reference.  Specifically, the "buffalo" sentence in Beyond 
Language actually appears on page 290, not page 190.  Perhaps this error
was reproduced from the original e-mail from Shirley Wolf, but I thought
you'd nonetheless want to correct or at least note it.

--
Tristan Miller, Research Scientist
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-TUDA)
Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt 
Tel: +49 6151 16 6166 | Web: http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/

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