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Not a native speaker, but if Ayn Rand is your mother I'd blame the first comma for the ambiguity.

"To my mother Ayn Rand, and God."



But that's just grammatically wrong, in English.

Appositive clauses require a comma. Forgetting God, you can just look at the sentence "To my mother, Ayn Rand." We put a comma there because the object of the sentence is "mother," and then we're clarifying who "mother" is. We'd only omit the comma if "Mother Ayn Rand" were a noun phrase all by itself, like "Father John."

Similarly: "This is to my arch-nemesis, Ayn Rand, who always doubted me." The commas are necessary there for the same reason.

(How did Ayn Rand enter this discussion..?)


Appositive clauses like that often require a comma. [0] I'd argue that this one does, even though it makes the sentence more confusing as a whole.

[0] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/596/01/


The problem isn't that there doesn't exist a sentence that maps onto only the meaning that Ayn Rand is your mother, it's that there exists a sentence which one could reasonably arrive at that maps on to both the meaning where Ayn Rand is your mother and the meaning where she's not.


If your mother is Ayn Rand, you've got bigger problems.

Sorry, couldn't resist.




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