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None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.
None of that would ever have ever happened if you had spoken with him.
Woods wrote:I've been a little bit too casual with the conditionals, but teaching French has made me reconsider if I'm using them right in English.
None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.
None of that would have ever happened if you had spoken with him.
It is a known fact that she didn't speak with him. Can both be used or only the second and what's the difference?
Woods wrote:I've been a little bit too casual with the conditionals, but teaching French has made me reconsider if I'm using them right in English.
None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.
None of that would have ever happened if you had spoken with him.
It is a known fact that she didn't speak with him. Can both be used or only the second and what's the difference?
Woods wrote:Time-sequencing of the if-clause
I told someone that it would be great if we do this or that.
I told someone that it would have been great if we did this or that.
When talking about the past (i.e. I told someone happened before, it isn't happening now) and the event the if- subordinate clause refers to happened, should there be time sequencing of the if-clause with the main clause?
Woods wrote:remember the guy whom / which / that you did this and that with/to?
Is there a subtle difference - like for example, if you say "which" you show less appreciation for the person than if you say "whom"?
linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".
linguoboy wrote:► Show Spoiler
Woods wrote:"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"
If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).
If we just take away the object pronoun, the phrase becomes somewhat unclear.
You're saying "which" sounds off.
What would you do?
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".
This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.
Woods wrote:"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"
If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).
If we just take away the object pronoun, the phrase becomes somewhat unclear.
Woods wrote:What would you do?
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".
This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.
Woods wrote:remember the guy whom / which / that you did this and that with/to?
"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"
Woods wrote:If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).
Linguaphile wrote:My question is, how repetitive do sentences end up if you have perfectly regular case endings with a singular declension?
First of all, whether they have case systems or not, many languages have situations in which there is a lot of repetition of word endings or entire words. Generally, I think speakers of those languages don't tend to notice the repetition much or give it much thought.
For example, English tends to repeat the word "the" a lot. (German doesn't have the same level of repetition of its definite articles precisely because of the case system and the three genders; there is a much wider variety of definite articles that can be used - der, die, das, den, dem...) In English we tend not to notice the repetition of the word "the". (For example, in your post, in your first five sentences you used the word "the" seven times. Yet it didn't seem to excessively repetitious at all. In fact, I had to have my computer's search function highlight them in order to accurately count all seven, because our brains are actually pretty used to not paying much direct attention to them, and without using the search function I skipped over one or two without realizing it even when I was actively trying to count them.)
...
Fluent speakers don't consider it odd-sounding; in fact, they hardly notice it.
...
You end up with sentences like this:
Pakub gruppidele ja üksikisikutele ekskursioone ajaloolistesse lossidesse, vanadesse mõisatesse ja muudesse ilusatesse hoonetesse.
(key to colors: genitive plural (-te-/-de-), allative (-le), illative (-sse), partitive plural (-e))
The English translation of that sentence also has a repetitive ending that doesn't sound especially jarring:
"It offers groups and individuals excursions to historical castles, old manors, and other beautiful buildings."
For the Estonian sentence, you can see here the effect of the regularity of the allative and illative cases. This obviously doesn't happen to that extent in every sentence, but it does happen fairly often on a smaller scale (i.e. two or three words with the same ending). It doesn't sound bad to me. The focus really is on the meaning, not the sound, so it just "sounds right" rather than odd, just like the repetition of "the" or the ending "-s" does in English. Because it has a grammatical function, it would actually sound odd without it.
https://business-english-success.com/ wrote:When we process language, we don’t give the same importance to every word. We tend to skip the little words, such as ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘of’, ‘at’ etc. and give most of our attention to the nouns and verbs. In other words, when we read the test sentence, we don’t really read the three instances of the word ‘of’ – we just blur past them.
These two points account for why native speakers tend to see three, instead of six.
Native speakers?
I’ve specifically mentioned native speakers more than once and there is a reason for this.
When you first learn a new language, all of the words are unfamiliar and all have equal importance. As you get more familiar with the language, you start to process the words in a more targeted way, for example, glossing over the small, familiar, words.
What this means is that if you give this test to someone who doesn’t speak English, they will most likely get the correct answer of six because, for them, it really is a pattern-matching exercise.
Dormouse559 wrote:Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".
This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.
It's a question of register, clashing levels of formality. "Whom" is quite formal, but putting a preposition at the end of a relative clause is not; in fact, if you're in a context that calls for "whom", chances are people will call you out for using final prepositions.
linguoboy wrote:Try this for fun: Search "whom" on this board and take a look at who uses it and where.
linguoboy wrote:The tip of a calligraphy brush is also called a nib. By whom?
dEhiN wrote:"So does it not stand to reason that there would be some native speakers for whom bread is only considered uncountable"
dEhiN wrote:"There's no indication or implication of whom you said the "I love you"s to."
Dormouse559 wrote:Not sure how I feel about "twenty years ago" hanging out there, but I'd have no issue parsing out where the relative clause begins.
Linguaphile wrote:Not only does it not sound like too much repetition to me, I'd be perfectly okay with adding that additional repetition of it (...)
The thing is that native speakers don't tend to notice word or morpheme repetition in the same way that non-native speakers do, when it is done for grammatical reasons. A good analogy is to say that sometimes a repeated word that has to be repeated for grammatical purposes is kind of like the glass in a window pane: if it's missing we're going to notice and it won't seem right, but when it's there, it's invisible and we don't even notice its presence. (...)
Naturally there are times when you want to avoid repetition in writing, and it may be difficult to find the balance between using a word too much and going out of your way to avoid repetition where it would have seemed "invisible" to native speakers. But in general I'd say that it's best to avoid repeating words that represent the subjects, objects, and non-copular verbs in a sentence, and don't worry too much about repetition of the smaller functional words.
Woods wrote:It's very interesting how you think in terms of registers, and I only do in terms of grammar.
What can I do to grasp these things?
Woods wrote:Should I downgrade all my whom's to who's when I'm not formal?
Woods wrote:Place all the prepositions before the pronouns and clauses they refer to* when I'm formal?
Woods wrote:* (I mean to which they refer... - you both are about to make me paranoid about the way I speak. The more we discuss these things, the more I get the impression that my English is an illogical combination of many styles that wouldn't naturally come together)
Woods wrote:All right, I get what you mean - so "whom" is totally out of fashion?
Also in the UK / Australia / other English-speaking countries?
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:The tip of a calligraphy brush is also called a nib. By whom?
Was that your phrase?
Why did you use whom then - irony?
Woods wrote:(linguoboy, I get confused if we remove the pronoun - "Remember that Jessica ten years ago I'm sure you're still thinking about?" - I no longer get the sense of how the two parts of the sentence relate to each other and need to force myself to think to figure it out.
linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:The tip of a calligraphy brush is also called a nib. By whom?
Was that your phrase?
Why did you use whom then - irony?
No, because the pronoun directly follows the preposition and, in this case, "By who?" sounded jarring to me. In colloquial speech, I would generally split the phrase and say "Who by?" but it looks odd to write that. So I went with a higher-register form which looked better to me on the page.
(For reference, the full sentences corresponding to these ellipses would be:
1a. By whom is it called that?
1b. Who is it called that by?
1a sounds way to elevated to say in an ordinary conversation. Even 1b is somewhat stilted, since the most natural formulation would be active voice, i.e. "Who calls it that?")
Woods wrote:It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.
Woods wrote:Shouldn't we strive to be a little bit more consistent and grammatically correct?
Woods wrote:I could give you a corresponding example from my native Bulgarian where 90 % of people nowadays say it one way and I do otherwise, but more grammatically correct, and I bet I sound like a writer from the 19th or early-20th century at latest to the educated and maybe even foreign and confusing to some less well-read people, but at the end I just want to say it that way.
Woods wrote:The problem is I may not have that awareness with English to judge, but still I feel like if I use "who" as an object, it must be always whom.
Woods wrote:How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?
linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.
To you because you didn't grow up speaking that way. There's nothing inherently "illogical" about having particular words take different forms when they appear in different syntactic contexts.
linguoboy wrote:you didn't grow up speaking that way.
linguoboy wrote:I've explained to you what the common usage is.
linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?
Generally not. IME, there's a pretty consistent set of features associated with various registers
Woods wrote:it comes from the same Germanic and before that Indo-European idea that an indirect object must be in the dative, and therefore take the m.
Woods wrote:The illogical part/thing/aspect for me is that two forms that are different only because of their grammatical function in the sentence are now selected depending on their position, while the purpose of what made them different was to make their position in the sentence irrelevant.
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.
To you because you didn't grow up speaking that way. There's nothing inherently "illogical" about having particular words take different forms when they appear in different syntactic contexts.
True, but it comes from the same Germanic and before that Indo-European idea that an indirect object must be in the dative, and therefore take the m.
Woods wrote:I didn't grow up with English, but I grew up with Bulgarian, which presents the same problem.
Woods wrote:The illogical for me is that two forms that are different only because of their grammatical function in the sentence are now selected depending on their position, while the purpose of what made them different was to make their position in the sentence irrelevant.
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:you didn't grow up speaking that way.
We did grow up being taught in school how it's right to speak though, which did not always correspond to how we were taught by our parents. So such inconsistency would be pointed out for sure.
but the difference with what you're explaining about English is that each person would pick their set of pronouns (who - who - to who / who - whom - to whom or who - whom - towhom2) and stick with them in every degree of formality and every context. Or at least I think so.
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?
Generally not. IME, there's a pretty consistent set of features associated with various registers
Would be interesting to hear more about that. Sounds like an important thing to be aware of, yet I don't remember anyone ever talking about styles of speech in English class.
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