Japanese Grammar in EBNF notation

Re:Japanese Grammar in EBNF notation by lifthrasiir on Sunday January 05, 2020 @03:38AM (#21960335)

> I wonder if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal.... has a Japanese equivalent, or perhaps just 100% hirigana will easily confuse this, thus making context-dependency a necessity.

I'm not aware of Japanese equivalents (probably due to my lack of Japanese knowledge), but the Gyeongsang dialect of Korean language allows a sentence that only contains a single syllable 가 (ga) and thus can only be distinguished by intonation. "가가 가가가" is a commonly cited example and pronounced (here denoted using X-SAMPA) and analyzed as follows:

    가  ka:     The kid (short for "그 아", itself short for "그 아이")
    가  ga      [topic marker]

    가  ka      The family name "Ga"
    가  <R>ga   A suffix for family (collective, unlike "씨" for individuals; e.g. "김가" for Kims)
    가  <F>ga   Coupla, weak question

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Re:Japanese Grammar in EBNF notation by glandium on Sunday January 05, 2020 @05:33AM (#21960636)

The dialect in Toyama, Japan has the famous "かか、かーかーかかーか" which decomposes/translates to:

  かか、 mother (お母さん in standard Japanese)
  かー this (これ)
  かー this way (こう)
  かかー write (書く)
  か ? (か)

In proper English, that would be "Mom, is it spelled this way?"

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Re:Japanese Grammar in EBNF notation by thaumasiotes on Sunday January 05, 2020 @06:18AM (#21960761)

For repetitive sounds, there used to be a fun English example on Wikipedia:

> Ted and Ed edited it.

I'm vaguely aware of two meant for Japanese, though since I know no Japanese, there are almost certainly errors in my report here:

> "Let's cover Eastern Europe", to-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.

> "Two chickens in the front yard and two in the back yard", niwaniwaniwaniwaniwaniwatori.

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Re:Japanese Grammar in EBNF notation by tasty_freeze on Sunday January 05, 2020 @11:07AM (#21961864)

I don't know if this is a widely used description, but there is a subreddit for this kind of thing, called "word avalanches". Some are purer than others.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WordAvalanches/

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