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> I guess it's more nuanced, but I don't have a PhD in economics like the author. English is funny. I knew exactly what you meant and I'm not saying it's wrong
by shric 4y ago
> I guess it's more nuanced, but I don't have a PhD in economics like the author.
English is funny. I knew exactly what you meant and I'm not saying it's wrong, but it would be read completely the opposite if you had said:
I guess it's more nuanced but, like the author, I don't have an PhD in economics.
- sdenton4 4y agoPer the 'about' page, the author of the blog post does in fact have a PhD in economics.
- shric 4y agoYes, that's why I said "I knew exactly what you meant and I'm not saying it's wrong"
- cornstalks 4y agoI think shric was just remarking that English is funny because you can take the exact same words of a sentence and rearrange them a bit so it means the opposite.
- naniwaduni 4y agoMost sentences can be rearranged to mean the converse. This is cross-linguistically pretty common, depending on which atoms you choose to rearrange. Most sentences can be negated with at most a couple of word changes. This is cross-linguistically about as universal and anything in linguistics is, again depending on which atoms you choose as "words". English isn't funny, humans are funny, building all sorts of redundancy into their languages, but then reversing polarity on a dime.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoNot sure how you'd rearrange the same sentence in German to reach the negation without having to change cases and grammatical roles.
- michaelgrafl 4y agoKomm, wir essen, Opa. Komm, wir essen Opa.
- renewiltord 4y agoSounds like a characteristic of nearly any language with positional negation. P => !Q Can be rearranged to mean so many weird things.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]