I hate English syntax because it's so persistently ambiguous.
Just minutes ago I was playing with the newly unveiled (and quite
wonderful) Google Trends
and I searched for
Google
itself. One of the news headlines that appeared in
the list was:
Google shares sink
So I wondered, hmmm, what might be this kitchen
sink that Google is sharing? Of course, a minute later, I
realized that shares
is not the verb but the subject and
sink
is not the object but the verb. Ah. This f*cking habit
the English language has of simply juxtaposing words without
indicating grammatical relationship (e.g., writing Google
shares
instead of Google's shares
)—and it's
particularly bad in newsspeak. I remember sometime back in 2000 I had
come across a headline that read
U.S. appeals court asked to rule on Florida recount
—and I figured there were dozens of ways it could be parsed:
A U.S. court of appeal has been asked to rule concerning the recount in Florida.
The U.S. government appeals the court which had been asked to rule concerning the recount in Florida.
The American appeals, which the court has asked to rule over Florida, are recounting.
The American appeals, which the court has asked, are about to rule concerning the recount in Florida.
—and so on: any of the words appeals
, asked
,
to rule
and recount
(and possibly even court
)
could be the main verb, and most of these possibilities give rise to
at least two different parsings. I agree that most of them are
meaningless, but still: it takes some effort to produce such an
ambiguous sentence in French[#],
whereas in English it sometimes seems that every zeusdamn sentence has
a tendency to be parseable in many ways (even two-word ones like
abuse pains!
).
I can see why it would be most unwise for an international treaty
to have English as only authoritative language! (There is the famous
case of the 1967
UN resolution 242 which calls for withdrawal of
Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent
conflict
, meaning, of course, from the
territories
, a reading clearly supported by the French version, retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires
occupés lors du récent conflit
, but which some have wished to read
as from some territories
. Not really the same sort of
ambiguity as mentioned above, but I'm sure better examples could be
found.)
On the other hand, garden-path sentences make for terrific jokes. I found this one quite hilarious when I first heard it:
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
The best I have, in
French, is la petite brise la glace
, which can
mean the small girl is breaking the window
or the slight
breeze is chilling her
(similarly there is la
bonne sauce la coupe
, la grande alarme le
modèle
or le pilote ferme la porte
, but none
is very convincing). There is also the strange case of c'est après que c'est arrivé
, which can mean two
completely opposite things: it happened later
or it
was after it happened
—but it's not really the same kind of
ambiguity.
Addendum: later entry on a similar topic.