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This is one of the posts of all time
Can make sense, imo.
If the speaker has never been to Berlin, then, naturally, more people will have been there than the speaker.
See: No well-informed meaning.
Even if the speakers has been there a million times… The speaker is still a single person, so there will definitely have been more people in Berlin than only the speaker
Well, you’ve only been to Berlin a few times while other people have been there millions of times
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the stegosaurus then we do now.
There are more atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
Statistically there are more people than outside the average.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
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”
My favorite is “The horse raced past the barn fell.”
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana
Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a day, give a man a fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his (*stab*) life.
Teach fish-man…to a life time!
Give a man fire, he’ll be warm for a while, set a man on fire, he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
Swordfish
Have you ever had a dream that, that, um, that you had, uh, that you had to, you could, you do, you wit, you wa, you could do so, you do you could, you want, you wanted him to do you so much you could do anything?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
I remember seeing it in school and having it explained to me so many times and my brain just refuses to understand it.
Buffalonian bison [that] Buffalonian bison bully [, likewise] bully Buffalonian bison
(Buffalonian is the demonym for residents of Buffalo, NY)
Police police police police police police police police police police.
Pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig.
I’m not getting it.
Elderly people pilot the watercraft
The seniors crew the ship
Octogenarians command the tide-faring vessel.
That’s the same sentence, but with a hat and monocle
The old [people] man (as a verb) the boat.
Thank you!
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”
This one took me a couple of rereads lol
This one is different if you’re reading vs saying it though, I would def emphasize syllables differently for “The old man” (subj) vs “The old” (subj) “man” (verb)
This is perfectly sensical. The speaker owns less humans than have visited Berlin.
Fewer
Sure
Accepted
Affirmative
Ack
Or, the speaker is not a person, and is some kind of plural entity, and the number of their instances that visited Berlin isn’t as large as it could be
deleted by creator
If the speaker owns the people then does their visited Berlin become the speakers?
Speaker can own 0 people
I feel a lot more like I did when I got here than I do now.
This one genuinely inflicts psychic damage to my brain.
Thats a good one i like that
There isn’t a place on Earth I’d rather not be
In German, we have “Nachts ist es kälter als draußen”, which means “at night, it’s colder than outside”
Bier schmeckt besser als im Glas
Beer tastes better than in a glass? 🤔
Yup :)
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.
Berlin had 12.4 million visitors in 2025. not all of those will have visited for the first time, but I’d still argue that medium sized won’t suffice here.
To say nothing about the fact that there is no time limit on when the person needs to have visited.
Xi have more people than Berlin
Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like
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.
I know i sure have.
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 vertieftAnd I foget the rest…
Instant Vietnam flashback to school
Small correction (you missed a line and rhyme) plus additional lines. There are variations, I’m just reciting the one I know, as best as I know it.
Dunkel war’s, der Mond schien helle,
Schnee lag auf der Sommerflur
als ein Auto blizeschnelle
langsam um die runde Ecke fuhr.
Drinnen sassen stehend Leute,
schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft
Als ein totgeschoss’ner Hase
auf der Sandbank Schlittschuh lief.Und ein blondgelockter Jüngling
mit kohlrabenschwarzem Haar
saß auf einer grünen Banke,
die rot angestrichen war.
Neben ihm ne alte Schrulle,
die grad siebzehn Jahr alt war,
und sie aß 'ne Butterstulle
die mit Schmalz bestrichen war.As for a translation, slightly liberal due to missing vocabulary:
It was dark, the moon shone brightly
snow covered the summer meadows
when a car rapidly
slowly rounded the curved corner
Within, people sat standing
in deep, silent conversation,
when a rabit, shot dead,
ice-skated on the sandbankAnd a blonde-curled youth
with hair black as a raven
sat on a green bench
which was painted red.
Next to him an old shrew,
who was barely seventeen,
and she ate a buttered bread
with a spread of lardOh so it’s basically the German version of Two Dead Men.
One fine day in the middle of the night,
two dead men got up to fight,
back to back they face each other,
drew their swords and shot each other,
one blind man to see fair play,
one dumb man to shout hoorayNo one can ever remember more than that
But this sentence does have meaning.
Escher sentences are ungrammatical because a matrix clause subject like more people is making a comparison between two sets of individuals, but there is no such set of individuals in the second clause.[5] For the sentence to be grammatical, the subject of the second clause must be a bare plural.[6] Linguists have marked that it is “striking” that, despite the grammar of these sentences not possibly having a meaningful interpretation, people so often report that they sound acceptable,[7] and that it is “remarkable” that people seldom notice any error.[5]
ah prescriptive linguistics, never change.
This isn’t prescriptive linguistics
if these linguists are surprised that people use language however they like then they sure as beans ain’t descriptive.
i don’t think people are naturally speaking in Escher sentences.
i mean if you say
Nobody is surprised by anything. They’re describing a phenomenon that happens in language.
Can you rephrase it to show the meaning more clearly?
Sure.
This is an example of a sentence that has meaning.
Ok. Thought you were talking about Berlin.
Berlin doesn’t have meaning.
“I have been to Berlin zero times. More people have been to Berlin than i have.”
Are you joking because that makes no sense
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
- 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.
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:
(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
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.
No what they said does make sense but it’s an interpretation of what was meant. It is not what was said.
Good one.
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!”
these are falsehoods, not ambiguous nonsense
Probably in chapter 1 of “How to Politician”
