On Sat, 18 Jul 1998, John Cowan wrote:
> > The famous example I know (probably I got this from Alain) would be if a
> > newspaper headline wrote LE PRESIDENT ASSASSINE, which doesn't tell you
> > whether the Président is dead (LE PRÉSIDENT ASSASSINÉ) or a murderer (LE
> > PRÉSIDENT ASSASSINE).
>
> By Anglo-American standards, at least, the latter is not a headline, because
> it is not a sentence. Until the Spanish-American War (1898), it was common
> for newspaper articles to have simple captions ("The War"; "Foreign News"; etc.)
> instead of headlines, although an 1783 example, "CORNWALLIS TAKEN!"
> is unimprovable even by modern standards.
A nice German example is
DER GEFANGENE FLOH
which can either mean `the prisoner escaped' (Der Gefangene floh) or `the
captured flee' (Der gefangene Floh)
Werner
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