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October 15

What my question is is is my question well phrased?

What I had had, had disappeared.

The second example is even better, because it doesn't need quotation marks (for any direct speech).

Two questions:

a) Bedises the consecutive identical words "had", are there other instances of three consecutive identical words (without quotation marks and without proper nouns), in a grammatically proper sentence, as far as the English language is concerned?

b) What about other languages (regardless of the analogous word for the English word "had" in those languages)?

HOTmag (talk) 04:08, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your header question can be rendered more obviously grammatical with punctuation:

"What my question is, is 'is it a grammatically proper sentence?'"

Your second example likewise:

"What I had had, 'had "had" disappeared'".

In neither case are the quotation marks absolutely required, but they render the meanings much more obvious.

Regarding (a), there are doubtless other similar possibilities, and you are surely familiar with the famous "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"."? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 05:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the memorandum about the buffalo. But I need an instance of three consecutive identical words, without proper nouns and without quotation marks (i.e. adding them will make the sentence ungrammatical). HOTmag (talk) 06:30, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The buffalo* sentence contains three consecutive identical common words. --Lambiam 08:04, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. HOTmag (talk) 08:19, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Then there's James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:59, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not only does your example remain in the same frame of "had" (while I asked for another frame), it also contains no "three consecutive identical words, without proper nouns and without quotation marks", hence it does not fulfill the requirement. HOTmag (talk) 08:16, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah yeah yeah. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:49, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, this is what I was looking for ! Thanx thanx thanx. HOTmag (talk) 12:55, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Really really really big

Great great great grandfather 115.188.72.131 (talk) 08:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See: Eckler, A. Ross (1996). "A Soup Can Can Can-Can; Can You?". Word Ways. 29 (2): 89–95. Avessa (talk) 12:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I notice that those English examples heavily depend on three properties of the English language:

In some cases, you can make a dependent clause without any form of conjunction or relative pronoun.
You can make compounds by just putting words together, spaced, but without any linking sounds.
Conjugation of verbs and declination of nouns is very limited.

In English, constituents may appear in relatively fixed order, but without clear markers giving the boundaries of such constituents, you can still make incomprehensible word soup. I consider parsing complex sentences in for example German easier, even when the main verb is several lines down from the subject. (My native language is Dutch.) PiusImpavidus (talk) 15:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Have you seen the list of linguistic example sentences? — Kpalion^(talk) 08:39, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Money money money.^[1][2][3] --Lambiam 08:02, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Had had

The expression "had had", is exlusive in that it is (probably) the most common English expression composed of two consecutive words - with identical spellings but with different meanings (Past Simple and Past Participle of the verb "have").

It seems to be even more common than "twenty twenty" (in which: only the first "twenty" means two thousand), and also more common than any two consecutive identical words one of which is a proper noun or a word inside quotation marks, like: say "say", write "write", hear "hear", like "like", and likewise.

The same phenomenon is found in Frisian (which is pretty close to English): had had = hie hie.

Are there other languages sharing the same property, as far as the verb "have" is concerned? HOTmag (talk) 05:08, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Twenty twenty" is (was) a very common pronunciation for the year 2020, but is not very commonly written out in words in that form. AnonMoos (talk) 07:21, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Of course. HOTmag (talk) 07:44, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The other Germanic languages, which would be the most likely guess, all seem to have different forms for the simple past and past participle (and some, like German and Dutch, also put the participle at the end of the sentence). Smurrayinchester 08:50, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Past participle is also found in languages other than the Germanic ones, for example: Romance langauges (e.g. French, Spanish), Celtic languages (e.g. Welsh, Cornic), Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Sanskrit). HOTmag (talk) 09:14, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

French has the passé antérieur, a form of the pluperfect, with il eut eu. Whether you accept that depends on whether you want identical spelling or are satisfied with identical pronunciation. --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:27, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes (also: eus eu, eût eu). HOTmag (talk) 17:43, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In some AAVE English, you can have the duplicated words been been form a stressed remote past progressive tense (there are a bunch of variant aspects -- detailed in e.g. Stevanin 2004 pp. 41--42.) The first 'been'/'BIN' is a stressed marker and remote past aspect, and the second is the past progressive 'been'.

Presumably since 'done'/'DUN' can also be used as an auxiliary particle (ibid. pp. 42--43), one could similarly see the constructed aspect done done, but I haven't heard of it. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:27, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I assume then that you are not from the American South, as "done done" is pretty common. Example:

Person 1: "I'm going to mow the yard."

Person 2: "No need, I've done done it." --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:56, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No I'm not. In that construction, is the initial "done" in that example being used in the stressed+remote aspect as "been" was described in the paper? (Sounds like it, but not sure.)

Also as an extra side note, most English usage (and most(?) other languages) has reduplication emphasis, as in these examples: "You good? Yeah, good-good."; "Do you like, as in like-like him?"; "I'm done. Done-done. Not a single thing left to do." The difference with the verb particle is (among other things) that it can be used in a full subject-verb-object sentence. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:49, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure what you mean by the remote aspect. "I've done (ie "already") done it (ie "mowed the grass")."--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:57, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"That that" is also fairly common. You can find it in Shakespeare and the KJV. --Amble (talk) 17:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also: "(He gave) her her (book)". HOTmag (talk) 09:28, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In Finnish, it is ei ollut ollut and eivät olleet olleet. And does English ever use passive forms of to be, such as "has been been", "had been been", "will have been been" and "would have been been"? --40bus (talk) 06:46, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

40bus -- English theoretically allows a "had been being X'ed" construction ("They had been being followed" or whatever), but it's usually rather awkward in practice, and it doesn't occur too frequently. Nothing with "been been" in standard English... AnonMoos (talk) 19:05, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Here's one example I can think of in Polish: Dostawca węgla miał miał na sprzedaż. "The coal supplier had (miał) coal dust (miał) for sale. — Kpalion^(talk) 08:34, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I remember an example from my school Latin classes: the accusative for "bad apple" is "malum malum". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:47, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

They had slightly different pronunciations in ancient Latin, since the "a" vowels of the two words differed in length. AnonMoos (talk) 19:07, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I remember one of them was spelled with an ā to denote a different pronunciation. That's in my textbook. But I doubt the Latins would have done that. To them, the words were exact homographs. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:40, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In French there's the construction avoir à, whose conjugation produces a homophonous and almost homographic sequence a à, as in il a à travailler "he has to work". --Theurgist (talk) 21:24, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]