"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in American English. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The explanation of "homophone" and "homonym" is not quite right. Two words are homonyms if they are spelled and pronounced identically. Two words are homophones if they are pronounced identically but spelled differently, e.g., "doe" and "dough." That said, the noun "buffalo" for "American bison" and the verb "buffalo" for "to bully" are not homonyms because they are the same word. To buffalo someone is to bully them in the manner of a bison. It's often assumed that the city of Buffalo is also named after the animal, but apparently there were never any bison in the region in recent eras. It's more likely a corruption of French Beau Fleuve, "beautiful river," a convenient name for Beaver Creek used by French traders and their Native American trading partners. So Buffalo, the city, is a homonym of buffalo, the animal and the verb. The longest series of homonyms I've ever seen was in Danish. Unfortunately this was before the internet era so I can't find it now. It was a fictitious newspaper headline stating something like "barbarians at a barbarian bar carry a barbarian..." Danish for "barbarian" is barbar, Danish for "carry" is bar, and Danish is a highly synthetic language like German and English (words are formed by fusing smaller words together), so it came out something like this: barbarbarbarbar bar barbar...
Thanks for all that Fraggle. I remember reading before somewhere that the city of Buffalo's name had nothing to do with the animal, the American bison. I am curious to know if you already know of the buffalo sentence. I just came across it yesterday and was surprised to learn it originated in the 1980s. I'm guessing you knew of it since you even know that Danish barbar bar sentence. The 'homo' definitions may be a bit off, but I enjoy the comical images of the buffalo just the same, especially the female (the cow!) with hr little yellow shoes and 'hoof bag' and lipstick. I checked: female bison do have horns albeit smaller than those of the male, so that aspect of the cartoon is at least accurate. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Bison are so closely related to cattle that hybridization has been successful--the "catalo." Some taxonomies even place them in the same genus. It's generally accepted that in ancestral cattle, the females had horns. Selective breeding has resulted in several modern domestic varieties in which only the males have horns.
Catalo, eh? I've also heard the term 'beefalo' used. It's interesting too that such a familiar domestic animal that we all know and many of us eat the meat of daily has no one common word in English. There is 'ox and oxen', but it suggests to me a plowing animal. 'Cattle' is a collective plural noun, 'bull' is the male; 'cow' is the female; 'calf' is the young; 'bovine' is the adjective, possibly it can be used as a noun, but of what animal? And who says 'bovine', anyway? You see what I mean? If a child saw this animal at a distance and couldn't tell if it was Bessy or Bob, what would he say? 'Look, mommy, there's a ______!' A dog is a dog, and a pig is a pig, but what word do we have for Bos primigenius?
As far as my experience goes, the singular genaric for cattle is "cow". "Oh look, there is a cow". "Cow tipping", "cow catcher".
You call a bull a cow and see how he reacts! There's also cow chips and cow patties and having a cow (or not having one). My question remains: If a child saw this animal at a distance and couldn't tell if it was Bessy or Bob, what would he say? 'Look, mommy, there's a ______!' ? i don't really expect an answer. I am just observing that it is odd that our language has no singular common non-gender specific word, except ox, which I think doesn't quite connote the same animal.
It is indeed common, yet not consistently used. Especially for non-bovine species, "cow" often means "female" and "bull" means "male." As for "ox," its usual meaning is indeed a draft animal, but specifically a castrated male. In the U.S., where they haven't been used for draft for many years, we call them "steers." Both "ox" and "steer" show up reliably in the other Germanic languages, and cognates pop up often enough in other Indo-European languages, so they are obviously venerable old words. But the ultimate source of either in Proto-Indo-European has not been identified. The same is true of "bull," although "cow" has a respectable PIE pedigree.
