Technology

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[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

I don't understand twice shorter -- how would you use it in context?

I think my example stands

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[–] Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 3 points 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

OK, either I don't understand you or you don't understand me, because that's what I'm also saying?

Your example "twice as short" works.

The original comment wasn't about your example.

The original comment was "several times shorter".

As you used twice in place of several times, I also put twice in there to make the difference to yours more obvious.

Twice shorter isnt the same as twice as short. You talked in your first comment about something different than the other comments talked about. That is what I wanted to express.

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[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

I don't think we understand each other.

To me, several times shorter makes perfect sense, and twice as short is a special case, where it is two times as short. Thus, several times shorter includes:

two times shorter == twice as short
1.5 times shorter == 1.5 times as short
five times shorter == five times as short
several times shorter == several times as short (the "as short" construction sounds clunky to me here in this case)

As i write these out, i realize what you were trying to say: X times shorter is equivalent to X times as short for me, so equivalent that I didn't realize when I was using one or the other.

You are saying that for some people, the "X times shorter" construction doesn't sound natural. I can respect that, but it doesn't seem like a part of mainstream English to me at least.

"Twice shorter" isn't what anyone is talking about. That isn't how you combine the words, at least to me.

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[–] Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 1 point 2 weeks ago

Ah thanks for spelling it out for me. English isn't my mother tongue, so for me both several times shorter and twice shorter felt somehow wrong. So I thought they were equally wrong. Thanks for explaining!