This quote came from a documentary my Linguistics professor showed in class today. I cannot remember the name of the person who said it, but they had a good point. Naturally, this sentence doesn’t make sense. However, it is grammatically correct, which deems it a proper sentence despite it having little or no meaning.
The documentary was on the subject of language and communication, and the discussion was around the idea that there are infinite combinations of words that can be put together to make infinite sentences. Language is described as being similar to a game of chess; each piece has a limited number of spaces it can move, but these pieces together can make infinite numbers of games. Respectively, each word has a limit within the sentence, (noun, verb, etc), but when constructed together, the amount of sentences that can be created are countless.
I do understand the comparison between language and chess, however, I don’t necessarily agree with this metaphor. I believe that if there are a limited number of moves a chess piece can make, then those moves can be counted, hence the number (though a big one) of possible games can also be counted. And, on an unreasonable level, so can the possible sentences in the English language. But no one has time for that, so we’ll just leave that one at infinite.
* I'm not sure if this is a direct quotation, but it's close.
P.S. Enjoy the comic... I know you love the lame jokes just as much as I do.
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FYI, just to clear things up a bit. Although it seems theoretically possible to calculate the number of possible games of chess, it is actually bigger than the number of atoms in the universe.. the WHOLE universe. Thats right, there is an estimated 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in our universe, and according to one theory out there, there are about 10^120 possibilities for a game of chess. And that is as close to infinity as one should care to go.
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