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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the sentence is trying to communicate
This relies on some illusionary filling in the gaps.
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.
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:
Most people answering quickly say $0.10
You are still leaving words out. Under a standard analysis of English, the full sentence would be:
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
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.
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.