Originally published at: "More people have been to Berlin than I have" — the strangeness of "Escher sentences" | Boing Boing
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Reminds me of Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence that is syntactically correct but semantically meaningless: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
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Did you know people eat more bananas than monkeys?
In fact, I can’t remember the last time I ate a monkey.
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Yes there is. A set with a single element is still a set. (So is a set with no elements, for that matter.)
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More people have understood this post than I have.
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Reminds me of a lesson about the importance of the colon in grammar, and how its use can make a profound difference in the meaning of a sentence.
For example, compare: “Johnny ate his lunch after school.” with “Johnny ate his colon after school.”
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In other words, more than one person has been to Berlin. So the sentence, while not as simply worded as it could be, still makes sense.
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Even simpler: consider the second ‘have’ to indicate possession.
How many people do you have? Fewer than the number of people that visited Berlin one hopes!
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#4 from the (ancient NNTP) “Brain damage quiz” list: I feel as much like I did yesterday as I do today.
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There is a world of difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!”
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Former prez DD Eisenhower is sometimes quoted as saying “Things are more like they are now than they’ve ever been.” And he was right!
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I read it differently:
The speaker has some people. How many they have is unknown. But its fewer than the number of people who have been to Berlin.
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I don’t think that works. Or it’s a tortured reading. This is comparing “the number of people who have been to Berlin” to “I have been to Berlin.”
The linked page gets at the real Escher-like quality here: “Wellwood and colleagues have noted in response that the possibility of each clause being grammatical in a different sentence”
So it would be grammatical and meaningful to say “you have been to Berlin more than I have” likewise to say “more people have been to Berlin than to Stuttgart.” But this sentence takes part of one and part of the other and combines them in a way that flies under the radar until you look closely.
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The famous German one being “Nachts ist es kälter als draußen”.
At night it’s colder than outside.
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On the topic of literary geometry, was reading Dashiell Hammett’s short story “Tulip”, in which the stand in for Hammett mentioned having written a detective story on a Mobius strip, that could be started at any point, and that he thought it worked kind of well. Don’t see signs that it exists, or ever existed, outside his hopeful imaginings.
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You can take a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.
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The same monkey that eats, shoots and leaves?
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Outside of a book, a dog is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
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I don’t get it.
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Oh wait. I see now.
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