Learn English – Does “nor he mine” make sense here

ellipsissentence-construction

I have been staring at this sentence for 5 minutes:

I looked up, though I could not see his face, nor he mine.

"Nor he mine" seems…off to me. Is this grammatically correct?

Best Answer

It's elliptical, that is, it drops some words for economy of expression, since the words omitted will be obvious to the native speaker.

I looked up, though I could not see his face, nor could he see mine.

American Heritage Dictionary "ellipsis"
"1. a. The omission of a word or phrase necessary for a complete syntactical construction but not necessary for understanding.
b. An example of such omission."

Related Topic