While it’s true that you could roughly manhandle the sentence to mean “More people have been to Berlin than I have [people]” (i.e. than the total number of people I own), I think it’s worth noting that the sentence “More people have been to Berlin than me” sounds equally valid, and yet is equally illogical.
Ok… I guess you could twist that one to mean “…than have been to me,” but I think both that and the “…than I own” interpretation of the first sentence are missing something. The point isn’t that we can somehow wrangle a logical meaning out of them, it’s that that meaning isn’t what people hear when they read it.
When most people read “More people have been to Berlin than I have” or “…than me” they’ll say “yeah, 'cause I’ve never been to Berlin”. Or, if they live near there, they’ll say “that’s not true, I’ve been to Berlin more than most people.” And in both cases they’ll be understanding a version of the sentence that was not actually said.
I think the article’s explanation of what’s wrong with the sentence is itself wrong, but it’s still true that the sentence is wrong for other reasons–for example, I’m pretty sure that “More people have been to Berlin than the three of us have” would also be grammatically wrong despite the fact that the second clause now refers to a set of individuals.
Here are a couple sentences that I think make sense: “Some people have more pets than I have”, and “Most people have more pets than the three of us have”
Here are a couple superficially similar sounding ones that don’t I think don’t make sense: “More people have pets than I have”, and “More people have pets than the three of us have”
If my intuition is right that the last two are ungrammatical, it must have something to do with the placement of “more” in “people have more pets” vs. “more people have pets” and how they each fit with “than I/we have”, but I don’t know what the specific rule of grammar would be.
I think that a better example of a correct sentence would be “More people have been to Berlin than tigers have.” The point is that the sets are mutually exclusive and comparable.
Good point, that’s kind of a different use of “have” than in my examples–your sentence could be expanded as “More people have been to Berlin than tigers have [been to Berlin]”, whereas my sentence “Some people have more pets than I have” would be expanded as something like “Some people have more pets than [the number of pets that] I have”.
In other words, the interpretation is that the speaker meant to say that they were not the only one to have visited Berlin? The other colloquial usage is as a complaint that others have been to Berlin, but not the speaker. It all depends on intonation.
