1) I wonder how you came up with that.
Do both the following sentences convey the exact same meaning as the one used above? Are they both grammatically correct?
2) How you came up with that, I wonder.
3) How did you come up with that, I wonder.
asked Jun 8, 2016 at 8:13
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1#2 is not idiomatic.– TimRJun 8, 2016 at 12:12
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Agreed with @TRomano - English word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object; in this case I is the subject, wonder is the verb, and how you came up with that is the object. It is possible to reorder them for rhetorical effect or emphasis (for example, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.") but in general it's not idiomatic to do so.– stangdonJun 8, 2016 at 14:35
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1 Answer
The third one isn't grammatically correct. If you don't have a question mark (and thus don't have a question), you can't use the subject–auxiliary inversion.
How you came up with that, I wonder.
Is correct, and might have a slight change of tone. To me, it adds disbelief and a somewhat condescending tone to the sentence by emphasizing I wonder at the end of the sentence, after a comma.
For the last one, you could say:
How did you come up with that? I wonder.
Which, to me again, conveys a similar tone of condescending disbelief.