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[–] 166 points 1 month ago (25 children)

The opposite is "garden path sentences" that seem incorrect or gibberish at first, but then make sense once you've correctly parsed them.

"The old man the boat"

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  • [–] 100 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana

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  • [–] 47 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (7 children)
  • [–] 35 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Elderly people pilot the watercraft

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  • [–] 62 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    I feel a lot more like I did when I got here than I do now.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 month ago*

    I have zero people, therefore more people have been to Berlin than I have. If I had a sufficient number of people, this sentence could be false. I'd probably need to be a dictator of a medium sized country, but it's possible.

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  • [–] 56 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (9 children)

    This is perfectly sensical. The speaker owns less humans than have visited Berlin.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 month ago (5 children)
  • [–] 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    In German, we have "Nachts ist es kälter als draußen", which means "at night, it's colder than outside"

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago

    When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    You've got to be kidding me. I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It's just common sense.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    In German there is this one poem made of contradictions:

    Dunkel war's, der Mond schien helle,
    als ein Auto blizeschnelle
    langsam um die runde Ecke bog.
    Drinnen sassen stehend Leute,
    schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft

    And I foget the rest....

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (16 children)

    But this sentence does have meaning.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (14 children)

    Can you rephrase it to show the meaning more clearly?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    "I have been to Berlin zero times. More people have been to Berlin than i have."

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Are you joking because that makes no sense

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago* (6 children)

    Huh, cool! No I'm being serious. It makes sense to me, even if it isn't grammatical -- i wouldn't notice that it wasn't grammatical except that it was pointed out in the meme.

    Maybe how much sense it makes is determined culturally.

    If i were trying to remove more ambiguity, i would say, "I have been to Berlin zero times. More people have been to Berlin than I have been."

    The last "been" is one of those "assumed" words that linguists talk about people leaving out of sentences.

    Let me know if that makes more sense.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    What are you actually trying to say though? The sentence ostensibly compares two values. "Number of times you've been to Berlin" vs "Amount of people who've been to Berlin". You can't compare those two. As a maths teacher would say, you're mixing your units.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I feel like the sentence is trying to communicate

    • I have never been to Berlin
    • many people have been to Berlin
    • i am in the minority, having not been to Berlin.

    This relies on some illusionary filling in the gaps.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Exactly. It is an ambiguous sentence. The interesting thing for me is how I could read it and not realize it was ambiguous because of my brain trying to fill in the gaps and understand what the other person was trying to say.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Huh, oh i see what you're saying now.

    If I've never been to Berlin, than the number of people who have been to Berlin is greater than the number of me.

    Where P = number of people who have been to Berlin.

    Me = number of me, who hasn't been to Berlin = 1

    P > 1.

    It seems like what you're saying is that this sentence either obvious on its face, because Berlin is a major City that plenty of people have obviously been to, or ambiguous that it is comparing the number of times I've been to Berlin to something undefined. I would agree that on closer inspection, the question is ambiguous!

    I would also say that P is also implicitly context dependent, in other undefined ways. Perhaps i mean that there are other people in my situation who have been to Berlin, where i have not.

    One underlying assumption I'm discovering through this discussion is that to me, the sentence implies that the speaker has been to Berlin zero times. But on closer inspection, that isn't the only way to read it. In a context where it wasn't clear if the speaker had been to Berlin or not, it would make much less sense.

    Have you heard of the book "thinking fast and slow?" by kahneman? I'm not sure how rigorous the science is, but it has other examples of sentences that people will interpret incorrectly if they aren't thinking carefully, because of the way that brains make unconscious assumptions to save energy and try not to think that hard.

    Some examples are, "What do Cows drink?" people who have to answer quickly without thought tend to say milk.

    Another:

    (1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.

    How much does the ball cost? _____ cents

    Most people answering quickly say $0.10

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    You are still leaving words out. Under a standard analysis of English, the full sentence would be:

    More people have been to Berlin than I have been to Berlin.

    In my judgement as a native English speaker (with an undergraduates degree in linguistics), both that and the original sentence are grammatical. However, it is not obvious to me what they mean.

    Looking at it as a linguist, I could hypothesise that the meaning is:

    A) The number of people who have been to Berlin is greater than the number of times I have been to Berlin.

    Going back to the original sentence, I could also hypothesise (as others in this thread have) that the underlying sentence is

    More people have been to Berlin than I have people.

    Meaning that I posses a quantity of people, and that quantity is smaller than the quantity of people who have been to Berlin.

    Neither of these meanings are intuitive to me (a native speaker), and I would struggle to produce a coherent analysis of either of them. To be clear, that last part is not disqualifing, there are plenty of things in language that have elluded coherent analysis. And many more that have done so from me.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    That goes to show how easy it is to leave words out and not realize it!

    In my other answer to the post, I try to explain what possible reasons there might be for the sentence making intuitive sense to me, even though I missed all the possible ambiguities until they were pointed out.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    It's interpretable that way because it's the only sensible meaning the sentence could have, but grammatically it's pretty much nonsense (the only grammatically correct interpretation I can parse from that is that the speaker owns less people than have been to berlin). It's purely context inference, it could say "more people berlin than I" and you can come up with the same interpretation.

    Fwiw I wouldn't reach that one at all, best I could come up with is "I am one person, more than one person has been to berlin, so more people have been to berlin than just me".

    It undoubtedly is nonsense.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    Python speakers unaffected

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    This is one of the posts of all time

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    What is the difference between an Escher sentence and a non sequitur?

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  • [–] 21 points 1 month ago

    A non-sequitur just doesn't relate back to the current topic of discussion in any meaningful way.

    An Escher sentence, as I understand it, sounds valid but doesn't actually have any real meaning when you actually parse through it. A non-sequitur still has meaning as a sentence, it's just off-topic.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Cleopatra lived closer in time to the stegosaurus then we do now.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    Well, you've only been to Berlin a few times while other people have been there millions of times

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    It was midnight and the sun was shining; The swallows were grazing, whilst the cows leapt from branch to branch; An old man, just 14 years old; Sitting upright on a rounded stone with four corners; Silent, he said: “The four greatest prophets were three: Abraham and Jeremiah!”

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Technically correct is the best kind of correct

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    The point of language is to convey meaning. Grammar is less important than what the speaker wants to tell other people.

    If this sentence, in context of a larger conversation, has meaning to the people listening to it, then congratulations! Rejoice, for communication has been achieved! Whether it was grammatically correct or not is irrelevant, because the intended target understands.

    Language changes over time. Nobody just decided to come up with modern English one day and it caught on, it's a gross pot filled with words and grammar from many other languages (some more melted than others, so not really a melting pot), and mostly filtered from a language nobody speaks anymore.

    So having what are essentially arbitrary rules that dictate how things must always be for that language is already pretty dumb to me.

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  • [–] [S] 26 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    But Escher sentences eschew that, because they are gramatically fine but convey no real meaning. Which is why a paradox like "this sentence is a lie" counts as one. And I like them because escher sentences are a rebel jist like me frfr

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  • [–] -2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Yes but my point is that if it conveys meaning to the intended target, it's irrelevant.

    Plenty of sentences, out of context, have no real meaning. The example in OP is one that could have meaning in the right context, which would be understood by its recipient

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago*

    This is one of those points that, although correct, is so vague as to be largely pointless unless discussing miscommunication or something of the like. Or are you suggesting we are never allowed to talk about sentence structure or logic again?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Agree with this 100%

    Folks that spend time sniping grammatical errors are boring. I'll go out of my way to decipher someone's weird ass sentence structure just so they feel understood. Say your grammatically inccorect Yoda sounding shit to me please.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    But it's not sniping grammatical errors, it's constructing a sentence that feels right but is devoid of meaning. This is a puzzle, not someone's embarrassment.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Like most sentences, this sentence has meaning in the right context. For example, imagine I told you beforehand that I owned people. Suddenly there is tons of meaning.

    Out of context, most sentences also don't have meaning. The lone sentences we do find meaning in have lots of bagaged context that is just assumed.

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