Why is this sentence tagged "unnatural" ?
Its author is a Native and it sounds perfect to me...

Perhaps
"He is smarter than me."
is more natural.

and perhaps "He is cleverer than I am."
sound more natural.

http://answers.yahoo.com/questi...3143844AAnMBrG

but this variant is perfectly acceptable as well. You can find many examples in literature and grammar books.

sacredceltic, you are not a native speaker, so you can't really judge how natural this sounds. Also, the author is unknown, so how do we know it is a native?

This sounds unnatural to me mainly due to the use of "cleverer" rather than "more clever". "than I" is just pompous not unnatural.

Yeah I think I adopted this simply so someone would be responsible for it, before I really understood that adopting a sentence should be a sort of stamp of approval. I'll unadopt it now.

@Zifre

"Cleverer" only sourds unnatural to you because you're from the USA. But English is initially from England and here is what English people are taught :
The inflection with disyllabic adjectives is used when the last syllable is unstressed (therefore: happy - happier, easy - easier), when they end with a syllabic "l" (simple - simpler) or with an "r" (clever-cleverer).

Well if British people actually say this then it should have a "British English" tag.

All that is not Usian is not "British". What do you know of what they say in India or elsewhere ?

besides, "British English" doesn't exist but for people who don't know about how English is spoken and taught in Britain. In Scotland, which also lies in Britain, schools teach "Standard Scot", which is even more apart from England's English than US English is...

here is a very recent example of use of "cleverer" in The Economist, which is one of the most renowned magazine in the UK and the world http://www.economist.com/news/s...ls-are-not-far

@remove tag

@remove unjustified tag