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Comment by hulitu | Hacker News Reader

> thought extinct for 6000 years

Does this makes sense for an English speaker ?

In British English it is totally reasonable and in fact relatively elegant, in American it might take a couple of seconds to figure out what was being said and it would seem ungainly for this reason.

On the British elegance: in British English one could of course use "thought to be extinct" and in these kinds of structures it has become common as a stylistic touch to drop the helping infinitive, "to be", considering it implied.

Right. But, one says "X is thought extinct." or "X is thought to have been extinct for 6000 years" (or "gone extinct ... ago").

As written don't you think it begs the question (joke, fellow language pedant :) of who was doing the thinking that it was extinct over the course of those 6,000 years?

if it was written "is thought" that would be wrong because it is not thought to be extinct, if it was written "was thought" then one would have the same problem of wondering who was doing that thinking.

The phrasing is pretty normal, however it might have been better handled with a comma between glider and thought - my personal preference.

This is one of the aesthetic qualities of English (the dropping of helping infinitives) that makes things like "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" or "Police Police police Police" possible

https://medium.com/luminasticity/cardinality-and-growth-rate...

I appreciate it as an example of the whimsical toleration of ambiguity common to English.

Although maybe it should have been "Tiny possum and glider thought: 'Extinct for 6,000 years!'"

To me as an American this sounds perfectly fine.

I don't usually use this structure, but my mother did, and she was an awesome writer. She was British, so it may be more common, over there.

Yes but they could've used the word "considered" instead.

"Possum considered extinct for 6,000 years"

Sounds fine to me but I am Australian

Yes, with the caveat that it's the distinct dialect of Headlinese

yes I recognize that as legitimate grammar, in a literary way.. It can be spoken that way, too..

It's a bad sentence. They mean "thought to have gone extinct 6000 years ago". But some allowance for headline constraints should be given.

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