This video was made possible by Skillshare. Start learning for free for two months by
signing up at skl.sh/hai36. Привет, and welcome back to Travel as
Interesting, the Russian travel channel that used to be about kind of interesting things
before we ran out of kind of interesting things and sold to a Russian media conglomerate! One quick note: sincere congratulations to
our mighty leader Vladimir for winning the 2024 election! Now, here are some of my favorite places to
go in Russia: uh, Moscow! And, uh, this building? And… uh… this guy’s house… ah, who
am I kidding? I’m not cut out for this. I mean, way more people have been to Russia
than I have, and honestly, I’m really more qualified to talk about interesting pieces
of linguistics trivia instead, like how the sentence “more people have been to Russia
than I have,” is totally meaningless and an iconic example of something called an “Escher
sentence.” Take a look at it again. It doesn’t make any sense when you actually
think about it, but you didn’t pick up on that when I first said it, did you? Fortunately, there’s a simple explanation
for this: you are a big dumb dummy. To be fair, though, everyone is. Well, I’m not, of course. I mean, look how many YouTube subscribers
I have—that’s big brain territory—but all your brains are mushy, and lazy, and when
parsing language, they often take convenient shortcuts by relying on familiar structures
and patterns. The sentence looks right because it’s a
seamless blend between two sensible grammatical palettes, and when combined, your brain is
still able to find a vague meaning that’s somewhere in between the two. In fact, we’re so reliant on common linguistic
structures that unconventional but still totally grammatically-correct sentences can be almost
impossible for us to understand, like “I think toilet paper should go in the under
orientation,” or… maybe a better example would be “The horse raced past the barn
fell.” Did the barn… fall? Is a “barn fell” a thing? Like, some kind of Amish funeral or something? What does this sentence mean? Well, if we modify it like this, it suddenly
becomes super clear that it was actually the horse that bit the dust. “The horse raced past the barn fell” is
a great example of a “garden path sentence,” where an ambiguity in a word’s meaning can
lead our brains down the wrong linguistic “path,” sort of like how an ambiguous
sign can lead my bike down the wrong path and into a surprisingly real-looking mural
of a tunnel, shattering my spine and likewise shattering my chances of ever making it to
the Tour de France, giving me no option but to become an incredibly successful and popular
YouTuber instead. Basically, we expect “raced” to be an
active verb, since that’s usually how sentences are structured—we wouldn’t have any way
of knowing that it’s actually a passive verb until we’ve finished reading the sentence,
gotten all confused and angry, and thrown our computer at the intern. This sort of lexical ambiguity can take reasonable,
legitimate sentences and make them look completely incoherent to the average person. This is why my recent police report, “Buffalo
buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” landed me in a psych ward while
those horrible buffalo continued to roam free. Whether my nurse believed it or not, “Buffalo
buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is actually a completely grammatically
correct sentence, but given that every word here is ambiguous, it’s essentially impossible
to read without explanation. You see, “buffalo” can be an animal, a
town in New York, or, if you’re an eccentric old man living in 19th century rural America,
it can be a verb, meaning “to bully.” I was merely attempting to explain that buffalo
from Buffalo, which other buffalo from Buffalo bully, also bully buffalo from Buffalo. Or, in other words, Buffalo buffalo, which
Buffalo buffalo buffalo, also buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Y’know, it might sound like silly nonsense
to you, but sooner or later, one of these buffalo is going to get hurt, and you can
blame lexical ambiguity for that. You can also blame lexical ambiguity for my
failure to pass police reform laws in Police, Poland, where my plan was, essentially, “Police
police Police police police police Police police.” In fact, you can take any word that serves
as a collective noun, adjective, and verb, and turn it into an equally incoherent yet
legitimate sentence. I mean, it won’t get you anywhere besides
that psych ward, but you can take comfort in knowing that you technically didn’t break
any grammatical rules along the way. Now, it’s hard to write a more confusing
sentence than that without breaking any rules in English, but much like our potential for
surveilling our own citizens using terrifying facial-recognition software, China has the
English-speaking world narrowly beat. In fact, there’s an entire Chinese poem
called “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” composed of 92 characters, all of which are
pronounced “shi,” just with different tones. Now, if this poem looks unreadable to you,
it’s probably because you don’t speak Chinese, unless you do, in which case it’s
probably because the Romanized version of this poem is pretty much incomprehensible
to Chinese-speakers and kind of just looks like the transcript of a helicopter taking
off. You see, this poem makes perfect sense when
written out in Chinese characters, with each character having a different core meaning,
or when spoken in certain Sinitic languages like Cantonese, where the syllables have 22
different pronunciations, but in present-day Standard Mandarin, which has been vastly simplified
over the past century, there are only four distinct syllables in the entire poem, making
it almost impossible to understand. It also doesn’t help that the poem is about
a guy that’s addicted to eating lions but ends up eating a bunch of rocks that look
like lions instead, which is honestly a pretty bad premise and confusing enough as-is, but
I’ll leave the narrative analysis to the experts down in the YouTube comments section. Now, if all of the sentences you write are
as incomprehensible as the ones I’ve talked about today, you might want to check out Hanif
Abdurraqib’s class, “Writing for Expression: How to Make Your Words More Artful & Lyrical,”
which you can watch today on Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community
with classes on video production, graphic design, entrepreneurship, digital music production,
and pretty much anything else you’d ever want to learn, but better yet, you can do
so for only a few minutes a day. You could take the time you normally spend
wandering in aimless circles around your house and spend it learning a useful skill that
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