"inferior than" - Re: New to me

[Wilson Gray]

arnold writes:

"Jespersen noted that 'different' can be modified by adverbs
used with comparatives, in particular '(not) much' ('other (than)' is
not modifiable in this way)."

True, but <sigh!> it probably will be:

"The iMac is not much inferior, other than the Dell XPS1."

It <sob!> already sounds almost not ungrammatical. ;-)

-Wilson


On Dec 29, 2007 2:21 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      "inferior than" - Re: New to me
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Dec 28, 2007, at 3:53 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> > From Backslash:
> >
> > Is the iMac _inferior than_ the new Dell XPS1?
> >
> > About 48,400 raw (they include standard strings like "Some Chinese are
> > _more inferior [in some way(s)] than_ others") Google hits.
>
> about ten times as many hits for "superior than", e.g.:
>
>   20 Yahoo! Answers - Is UK superior than the rest of Europe? –
> Discover the answer for this question and Earn more points for the
> best answer on Yahoo!
> http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071223075247AAqCSls
>
> new to me as well, and a quick look at some of the usage literature
> doesn't turn up alarm bells there.  but the usage is scarcely
> surprising, given the celebrated "different than".
>
> one possible analysis would be that it's a combo of "inferior/superior
> to" and "worse/better than"; that would be parallel to the analysis of
> "different than" suggested by the OED and Poutsma (according to
> MWDEU), in which it's a combo of "different to/from" and "other
> than".  ("different to" is the first attested usage.)
>
> but Jespersen had a different idea, a better one, i think -- that
> "different" was viewed as a comparative, and so picked up the
> appropriate preposition for comparison, namely "than".  in support of
> this idea, Jespersen noted that "different" can be modified by adverbs
> used with comparatives, in particular "(not) much" ("other (than)" is
> not modifiable in this way).
>
> "inferior" and "superior" are comparative as well (and can be modified
> by "(not) much"), so it makes sense that they should get the
> comparative preposition "than" too.
>
> "than" encroaches in other places as well, in particular for "as".
> MWDEU notes occurrences of "twice as many ... than" and "twice as
> much ... than" -- which it treats as syntactic blends (of "more ...
> than" and "twice as many/much ... as"), though they can be seen just
> as extensions of comparative "than" into new territory.
>
> arnold
>
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