Answers to “Fun with Russian”

Woah. Where did last week go? I can’t believe how busy that was…

So, answer time. For a refresher, the challenge was to insert appropriate spaces to turn this into intelligible Russian:

kolokolokolokola

Ammon von Lovell found three answers, but I’m only aware of two, so I’ll be curious what he found that I didn’t.

Here are my two:

Kol okolo kolokola – The stake is near the bell

Kolokol oloko kola – The bell is near the stake (don’t you love Russian word order ambiguity?)

The source of this puzzle was the Wikipedia entry for Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. The page points out interesting linguistic constructs involving repetition in many languages.

Let’s hope this week affords more opportunities to blog than last… I still can’t believe how busy I was.