Ben Zimmer in Language Log:
But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of “open-class” or “lexical” morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words? This characterizes nonsense verse of the “Jabberwocky” variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism.
Here's the relevant passage (pieced together from snippet view on Google Books):It is essentially experience with our own language that ensures this identification of “parts of speech”; familiarity with common types of sentences and with the ways in which different semantic categories are built into them. Indeed, so deeply engrained is our knowledge of such conventional forms and of word affixes that we have no difficulty in analyzing “nonsense” sentences of simple types:
The ventious crapests pounted raditally.
(adjective) (noun) (verb) (adverb)We can readily translate this into French:
Les crapêts ventieux pontaient raditallement.
but we cannot carry over these parts of speech, or the sentence structure, to more remote languages any more than we can translate each word into a word. Thus, this nonsense sentence could not be put into, say, a Chinese dialect!
More here.