Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

occisio anaticulæ

There’s been a skirmish of entries over at the Language Log about Effle, i.e., meaningless English sentences from EFL textbooks. Somehow, the lovely sentence the farmer kills the duckling got included. I have to agree with Geoff Pullum that Edward Sapir originated the duckling-killing sentence:

Let us begin with a simple sentence that involves various kinds of concepts—the farmer kills the duckling. A rough and ready analysis discloses here the presence of three distinct and fundamental concepts that are brought into connection with each other in a number of ways. These three concepts are “farmer” (the subject of discourse), “kill” (defining the nature of the activity which the sentence informs us about), and “duckling” (another subject of discourse that takes an important though somewhat passive part in this activity). We can visualize the farmer and the duckling and we have also no difficulty in constructing an image of the killing.

[Edward Sapir. Language, 1921, p. 86.]

Removing this sentence from its context may diminish its beauty, but it is as simple as it needs to be to illustrate Sapir’s point and really has nothing to do with English as a Foreign Language, except, of course, that his was. Anyway, I’ve always preferred the rurality of Sapir’s simple sample sentence to the forced urbanity of Chomsky’s colorless green one. Quack.