HN Explorer

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arethuza
A similar example from Doric Scots: "Fit fit fits fit fit"
vesinisa
Similar tongue twister in Finnish:

    - Kokko, kokoo kokko!
    - Koko kokkoko?
    - Koko kokko!
Meaning (Kokko is a male name but also means 'bonfire'):

    - Kokko, gather up a bonfire!
    - You mean the whole bonfire?
    - The whole bonfire!
PrimeDirective
WILL WILL SMITH SMITH? YES, WILL SMITH, WILL SMITH.

enjoy the uppercase!

Retric
Odd, I never noticed capitalization making things clearer, but it helps.

Will Will Smith smith? Yes, Will Smith, will smith.

PrimeDirective
it doesn't and that makes it even funnier
Retric
Sure it does, while not unambiguous both of these for example are valid.

  Will Will Smith smith? Yes, Will Smith, will smith.
  Will Will smith Smith? Yes, Will Smith, will smith.
damasko
JAMES WHILE JOHN HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD A BETTER EFFECT ON THE TEACHER.

Hm ... No panacea.

BLKNSLVR
What if Will Smith won't smith? Well, if Will Smith won't smith then we'll find another smith that will smith what Will Smith won't.
Spare_account
The best I can do is "The space between Fish and And and And and Chips is too small on that sign"
dannyfraser
Martin Gardner came up with a somewhat contrived but still brilliant extension to this:

"Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sen...

Zhyl
Yorkshire (England) dialect.

"It is not in the tin."

"T'in't in tin"

- Jimmy Carr

BLKNSLVR
I was just trying to explain this to my niece last week. She responded along the lines of how messy the English language is, but my counter argument was that it highlights the flexibility of language, which allows its use to be artistic as well as functional to a degree that's entirely at the discretion of the speaker / writer.
Symmetry
See also garden-path sentences.

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

"The old man the boat."

"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."

"The horse raced past the barn fell."

Xophmeister
"The horse raced past the barn fell" is embedded just one level deep. Besides it becoming completely unintelligible, there's nothing to say that you can't nest arbitrarily:

    The dog the cat the mouse liked hated barked.
Of course, language isn't prescriptive, so it's arguable if this is allowed. It's grammatical, in a technical sense, but not acceptable to, I'd imagine, most English speakers.
thomasedwards
Barely related but I love it: “it was warm” in Japanese can be said ‘atatakakatta’.

With the kanji gives it context within the language, 暖かかった, but written in rōmaji it’s hard to know what’s what.