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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
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.
Thats a good one i like that
This one genuinely inflicts psychic damage to my brain.
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 :)
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
Good one.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
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…
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
Instant Vietnam flashback to school
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.
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
such a flex to put Escher and eschew so close together 🙌
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
You’re both looking at it from completely different angles.
You’re seeing it at a way to criticise someone’s grammar; they’re looking at it as a puzzle to construct a grammatically correct sentence without imparting any meaning.
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.
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.
I was responding to the parent comment not to OP.
And to be fair, if the person in OP may have just found the most ridiculous way to say they’ve never been to Berlin.
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
Well, you’ve only been to Berlin a few times while other people have been there millions of times
Technically correct is the best kind of correct
What is the difference between an Escher sentence and a non sequitur?
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.
Probably in chapter 1 of “How to Politician”
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.
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
