The Wikipedia discussion of that example is interesting. I stuck with "raced" as a verb, with the horse passing an upland moor called barn. (Barn, as the name of a fell, probably being a corruption of an old word for bear (the animal).)

The Wikipedia interpretation makes the sentence clumsy and somewhat nonsensical (in real world terms: a horse having been raced beside a barn (farm building)? That is unlikely unless the barn is extremely long as barns go, which is also unlikely).

The curse of a large vocabulary: you often misinterpret what people say, especially when you don't have both a good theory of mind for the speaker, and the context.

All non-finite languages have edge cases like that, as far as I can see.

English is much more prone to it due to a weak grammar (both syntax and inflection.) It's easy to tell when a German sentence is ungrammatical because of the specificity of the syntax and inflection (which English barely even has.) Older languages like Latin (or even formal Portuguese) are even more intense with the inflection. Anyway, all of that stuff works like checksum, kind of like packets having CRC32 all over the place. English has veeeeery little checksumming in comparison.

True. English has less redundancy to potentially clarify things. Yet it seems you have to go out of your way to find the edge cases.

At any rate, Chinese grammar is far weaker.

> Yet it seems you have to go out of your way to find the edge cases.

I don't find that. I see ambiguity all the time. Right now it even seems like the majority of arguments online happen because of equivocation. (I'm not saying grammar could fix that though :P)

sure but i think english is highly prone to anomalous grammar and structure because of the wide variety of influences and amalgamations.

In comparison to stricter languages, yes. English is far less prone to it than languages like Chinese though.