Maine Basanti Ko Nahaate Huey Dekha

This cartoon appeared today in my Facebook feed:

I’m posting it on Linguistrix because it’s a rather cute display of syntactic ambiguity, and for a change, it’s in Hindi. Syntactic ambiguity is when a particular sentence can be parsed in more than one grammatically correct ways, each with a different meaning. A popular example is I shot an elephant in my pajamas, which has not two but three parsings—either I was wearing my pyjamas, or the elephant was inside my pajamas, or that the elephant was wearing my pajamas. Note that most speakers, when confronted with that sentence, would tend to choose the most reasonable sounding meaning (that I was wearing pajamas), but that doesn’t mean that the other two readings are incorrect. In fact, the shock value introduced by the unnatural parsing is used for humor in the full version of the quote:

I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

…how he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.

–Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers

In the cartoon, it’s the modifier nahaate huey that is the source of ambiguity. It could either confirm Veeru’s fears and modify Basanti, in which Gabbar’s in for a visual treat, or it could modify the verb dekha, in which case Veeru can be in peace.

Languages are so rife with ambiguities (including semantic ) that it would be delusional to imagine that languages are supposed to be or intended to be unambiguous (first of all, no one intends a language, unless they are sitting down and designing one). Yet, people keep on flogging the dead horse, trying to claim that some constructions are ungrammatical just because they are ambiguous. It is a useful advice to writers that they avoid writing pointlessly ambiguous prose, but that prose does not become ungrammatical merely because it can have multiple meanings.

  • Sham Thanekar

    “Kutte mein tera khoon pee jaoonga” can also be interpreted differently.

    • http://www.facebook.com/antariksh.bothale Antariksh Bothale

      What is the other interpretation?
      If you are referring to the version in which mein is a post-position instead of a pronoun, that is just because of the wrong transliteration followed in the cartoon. It’s not an ambiguity in Hindi.

      • Sham Thanekar

        That’s what I meant. Said it in jest really. I’d come across a sentence recently which could be interpreted in seven different ways.. can’t seem to find it again sadly.

  • Abha Avinash Kulkarni

    Finally, my prayers of reading a new post have been answered :P i wish you had put up more such examples. By the way, is this an example of a dangling modifier or paraprosdokian? 

  • http://www.nishanttotla.com/blog Nishant Totla

    Can you give an example of a sentence that can be parsed only one way syntactically, but is semantically ambiguous?

    • http://www.facebook.com/antariksh.bothale Antariksh Bothale

      Yep:

      I like bugs.

      The ambiguity here is because of multiple meanings that the word bug has. You dunno whether I like insects or program errors. 

      This is called a lexical ambiguity.

  • Sudesh Kumar Agrawal

    I 

    • Tanay

      Syntactic ambiguity is the idea.
      What we perceive in the first read is merely based on common sense and common understanding.