Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Yeah, runs of nouns and gerunds are notoriously hard to parse. Even a short phrase like "Finding Nemo Audience" cannot be parsed unambiguously. That's what you get when most words can function as nouns verbs and adjectives alike.

"The old man the boat." - a grammatically correct sentence in English. It's like Perl of human languages :)




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Doesn’t really apply to the post title, though. Quotes would help. In Germany we have a thing called “Durchkopplung”. Basically, there are no spaces allowed inside nouns, so compounds are either concatenated or “durchgekoppelt” (which nobody does, unfortunately): The Magic-The-Gathering-Color-Wheel. However, in this case, the most elegant solution would simply be a more clear construction: “The color wheel of ‘Magic: The Gathering’” or, less fortunate, “Magic-The-Gathering’s color wheel”.


What I find interesting is that in spoken language the ambiguity is reduced.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: