The landlord of a pub called The Pig And Whistle asked a sign writer to make a new sign. When he saw it he thought that the words were too close together, so he said to the sign writer “I want more space between Pig and And and And and Whistle”.
Inspired by the story, another landlord decides to name their pub "Pig and And and And and Whistle." Lo and behold, the sign was cramped... Ther needed more space between Pig and and and and and And and And and and and and and And and And and and and and and Whistle.
Nah, it's referring to the first space by grouping the first and second words, "Pig" and "And," and then referring to the second space by grouping the second and third words, "And" and "Whistle."
I came here to post this, it's my favorite sentence in the English language. Although imo it makes more sense if you switch your "while" for a "where".
Some Hungarian prefixes can be piled on without limit, while still creating meaning.
The word "úszni" means "to swim".
Úsztatni - to make someone or someone swim
Úsztattatni - to make someone make someone swim
Úsztattattattattattattattattattni - to make someone make someone make someone ... make someone swim
Can be done with any verb, and maybe some other suffixes as well.
"That that" spoken are two different sounding words so it makes sense. When it goes from verbal to written and I see it, I will almost always try to rephrase things to avoid that combo. It just jumps out as totally wrong.
In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first "that") is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word "to", which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.
Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it's not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.
Given the fact that that poem is 100 years old, I would have thought that English would have evolved to fix these issues by now. Oh well.
We need a new language I guess. Maybe it's time to switch to the most popular language in the world (in terms of number of native speakers): Mandarin Chinese.
As someone who has studied it, have fun with that. While that poem is an outlier, there’s still a ton of things that not even inflection or context can solve.
I'm pretty sure it is grammatically correct with no comma. The version you provided is a comma splice.
To slightly change the tense, All the good faith that I had had no effect is grammatically correct with no comma, so the gerund form should also not need a comma.
It doesn't need a comma, it needs restructuring. When phrasing it like this, it is customary to add a comma between two adjacent verbs. You could even argue that the first part is an introductory phrase, which would explain the comma too.
english is dumb. why do we say "hands," but we don't say "foots"? why does "goose" become "geese," but "moose" doesn't become "meese"? why is "led" the past tense of "lead," but "red" is not the past tense of "read"? why don't "good" and "food" rhyme? LIGHT becomes LIT, fight becomes FOUGHT. peek becomes peeked, seek becomes SOUGHT
Maybe I'm just grouchy today but how in the world does a word coming up twice in a row translate to a language being flawed? That seems like calling spelling "flawed" because letters come up twice in a row in a word.
I remember one time at r/peloton one of those tribalistic mildly-xenophobic nutcases told me, after sharing an article in spanish which had some ambiguous word, something to the effect that "spanish is the most confusing language in the world".
Edit: while some might think it nuts (it’s not like GBS was universally received, he was deliberately inconsistent), the idea of rebaselining phonetics from scratch was impressive.
I borrowed some ideas from it in how I use ðem, but ð letters are old english alphabet originals, same for ƿ but ðat would incur ð wraþ of even more annoying prescriptivists
Have you heard the tragedy of pumping lemma?
Have you heard the tragedy of the tragedy of pumping lemma?
Have you heard the tragedy of the tragedy of the tragedy of pumping lemma?