- It shows “corner cases” in our own human languages where meaning is not clear even when a sentence is grammatically correct. (This possibility is perhaps more obvious to tech people, but a surprise to many)
- It shows how understanding a sentence is so different from reading. When, with some aid, one finally can read the buffalo sentence and understand it, it’s amazing to realize how it “clicks”. As technothrasher said, this is interesting to those understanding how the brain works.
- As others noted, reveals how much of human language is about defaults and convention, and NOT about parsing based in grammar. This was something that had to be learned; early thinkers sometimes assumed that the brain was just a parser.
- For hackers, it’s interesting to find ways to “break” a human language while playing by the rules (grammar).
- It shows “corner cases” in our own human languages where meaning is not clear even when a sentence is grammatically correct. (This possibility is perhaps more obvious to tech people, but a surprise to many)
- It shows how understanding a sentence is so different from reading. When, with some aid, one finally can read the buffalo sentence and understand it, it’s amazing to realize how it “clicks”. As technothrasher said, this is interesting to those understanding how the brain works.
- As others noted, reveals how much of human language is about defaults and convention, and NOT about parsing based in grammar. This was something that had to be learned; early thinkers sometimes assumed that the brain was just a parser.
- For hackers, it’s interesting to find ways to “break” a human language while playing by the rules (grammar).