artifact · linguistics · 001

BUFFALO RECURSION MACHINE

a single word. a complete sentence. as deep as you like.
words 0
depth 0
vocab
click any noun-phrase bracket to nest it deeper · × on a bracket collapses one layer · hover to see what it means
in english, roughly

buffalo is unusually load-bearing. It is at once a noun (the bison), the plural form of that same noun, a proper noun (the city in upstate New York, used here as a modifier — "bison from Buffalo"), and a transitive verb meaning to intimidate. The five-word sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo is already grammatical. The trick is that any noun phrase NP can be wrapped by a reduced relative clause: NP that NP buffalo — also written NP NP buffalo. That wrap is itself a noun phrase, so it can be wrapped again. And again.

Switch the vocabulary to fish to drop the city and watch the sentence get even denser per token. Source: linguistics transcript in notes/linguistics transcript.md.