Is this ‘which’ dead? | Hacker News Reader

Is this ‘which’ dead?

grammarphobia.com

78 pointsCaiero67 comments

In french these 2 usages are distinguished through "que/qui/quel" vs. "lequel". This phrasing is often seen in legal texts.

You'd translate "The appellant made a motion which is now granted" with "Le requérant a déposé une requête qui est maintenant acceptée".

vs.

"The appellant made a motion, which motion is now granted" with "Le requérant a déposé une requête, laquelle motion est maintenant acceptée".

("granted" might be translated differently than "acceptée" but you get the point).

If you’re interested in hard-to-parse English relative clauses, check out the first sentence of George Washington’s first inaugural address:

“Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.”

I'm very sorry but someone's going to have to translate this for me, please? bonus points for a successful haiku.

"I'm happy to have received your message" / "Thanks for the heads-up" / "Notification marked as read"

argmax(DREAD, g_life->getVicisstudes()) == getNotifications().find(from:you, date:{day==14}).getSubjectEvent()

Bug report: current month not specified in RHS.

you sent me a letter and holy fuck was it a bummer

By your order a message was transmitted. I received it on the 14th of this month. That message was about some event. This event filled me with great anxiety. The anxiety was greater than that caused by other events from the vicissitudes incident to life.

The thing I feared most

Was receiving your letter

And then it arrived

As a French this looks like the kind of sentence I could write if I was translating word for word to English.

The word for word translation of the discourse is also quite readable in French: "Aucun événement n’aurait pu me rendre plus angoissé que celui dont la notification a été transmise par votre commande, et reçu le 14e jour de ce mois."

You’re right but the word dont always poses trouble for English learners of French

As a German this also reads like a fairly normal sentence. In written form it would have a couple more commas in German, which would make it easier to read, but when delivering a speech verbally this is taken care of by intonation and pauses anyways, turning this into a non-issue for the intended audience even in English.

what an odd thing to say in an inaugural address. this is a very directed sentence.

It's addressed to "fellow Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives".

I fail to understand how is that different than let say...

"I read an article which I didn't understand".

Is it really that different than:

"I read an article about English grammar, which article I didn't understand" ?

For me the second one seems like it is asking a question. My brain wants to swap “I didn’t” into “didn’t I” and add a question mark to the end.

This is sort of thing I might write:

"I read something by Victor Davis Hanson today, which article I didn't understand".

But I like retro phrasings for their own sake.

If you say something like "I read an article about grammar, which I didn't understand", it's ambiguous whether "which" refers to "article" or "grammar". In this specific example it's pretty clear from context, but it could be a bit confusing with a different object ("I read an article about the new theory, which I didn't understand.")

I'd just rephrase the whole sentence to avoid ambiguity if it were a problem because saying "which article" doesn't quite feel right in this context—a bit too formal and old-fashioned?—but this use of "which" seems like a reasonable way to disambiguate if it fits in context.

This was my thought. It's the restatement of the noun for specificity that's rare now, not the word "which".

We drop the implicit noun just like we drop the imperative subject, i.e. we say "Close the door" now instead of "Close you the door".

Fly you, fools!

That comma, oof. Try it without.

Or even "Fly, you fools!"

That is what’s rare, but you’re missing something important: the reason the repeated noun is there to begin with is to avoid ambiguity about what, exactly, is being granted, since there are multiple available antecedents. The errors? No, the motion. In other words, the noun isn’t implicit, or at least not adequately implicit.

Even in 1934, you didn’t think of it as eliding the noun when you used “which” as a pronoun; rather, you thought of using the noun again as an escape hatch for ugly situations like this. More to the point, in modern English, where we don’t have this option, we’d have to restructure the sentence to avoid this ambiguity, not simply drop the noun.

"Close you the door" sounds completely ungrammatical to me. Is it or was it ever considered grammatical in modern English?

The difference is the restatement of the antecedent in the second example you give. You used "article" twice.

Since "which" is a pronoun, it can stand in for the actual noun, as it does in your first example. But sometimes the noun is restated along with the pronoun.

Here's another interesting example: "Which article didn't you understand?" In question form, the "ante"cedent of the pronoun would actually come long afterward, even from a different speaker, as the answer to the question. But to add clarity to the scope of the question, a noun summarizing the answer type ("article") accompanies the pronoun.

The meaning is clear and identical, but the grammatical function of the "which" is different in the two examples. In the first one ("... which I didn't understand"), "which" acts as a relative pronoun, referring and replacing the thing it refers to. In the second case, "which" acts as an adjective modifying the noun ("article"). That is the unusual usage.

Note, for example, that we definitely don't do it with "who":

"I saw a girl who was singing."

"I saw a girl, who girl was singing."

> In the second case, "which" acts as an adjective modifying the noun ("article"). That is the unusual usage.

"Which" as an adjective is still relatively common. Consider, e.g., "Which one did you say you replaced?" It's the fact that it's being used as an adjective instead of a pronoun in this case that is unusual.

That's not an adjective. It's a determiner. (In your usage and in your parent comment's usage - the difference between the two of you is that your use is interrogative.)

(Determiner is the part of speech to which the articles belong, but it also includes things like each, this, some, etc.)

Determiners can also be used as either adjectives or pronouns.

Determiners can't be used as adjectives, ever. When applied to a noun, they fit into the determiner spot. There is no way to change that.

"Determiners can be used as pronouns" isn't true either, though many of them can. See whether you think you can do it with every or a(n).

I think you could use “who said girl” though (especially when the first phrase is really long).

I have literally never heard the latter formulation from a native English speaker. It's very awkward phrasing.

A pedant might point out that "I read an article which I didn't understand" should be written "I read an article that I didn't understand" or "I read an article, which I didn't understand." In this case, the "which" case is appropriate, but the sentence needs a comma. In general, if there is no comma, you should be using "that", and if you are using "which", you need a comma.

How about "I read an article and I didn't understand it"? Why complex why simple is just as good ?

There’s a character in the Aubrey-Maturin series who uses this construction often. I always wondered if it was an idiosyncrasy, a regionalism, or an archaic usage. Guess this answers it!

Fun to see the Aubrey-Maturin series mentioned here; that was indeed the first thing I thought of.

Killick's use of "which" always struck me as odd. I'm not entirely sure if it's the same grammatic construct as the one in the article. Here [1] is a discussion about it. The top answer argues it's just a meaningless discourse marker. It was also covered in Mark Liberman's Language Log [2].

Apparently the conjunctive "which" is increasing in usage as a discourse marker [3].

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/245363/what-is-t...

[2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000118.h...

[3] http://colinmorris.github.io/blog/which-discourse-marker

This construct is still used a lot in Dutch (‘which’ -> ‘welke’).

Considering Dutch is the nearest (major) linguistic neighbor, that makes a ton of sense.

Is not German a closer language than Dutch to English?

Nope - old English comes from the Ingles and Frisians, which live in modern-day Netherlands.

East Frisian is technically the closest extant lingua, but is rather niche. Old English would be mutually intelligle to Frisian speakers. Dutch is the next nearest.

It's a "Germanic" language in that it's in the same family as Danish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, etc; but the High German, Swiss German, etc spoken today are one step further back.

That all being said, while linguistically it fits in that family of languages and about 50% of the vocabulary can be directly connected to them, it's a massive mutt of a language with plenty of romantic influence (mostly in vocabulary) via Norman French. Along with smatterings from Indian, Japanese, Spanish, various Native American languages, etc.

I don't know Frisian at all, but German is a lot easier to understand for me at least when reading than Dutch is. I know that Norman influence basically made English into its own Frankenstein of a thing so may be Old English matches Dutch better. It's regardless of the history german being close to English makes sense from just my naive experience of both languages (dutch and german). Or may be I just dont touch enough Dutch.

I mean, all of the Germanic languages are superficially similar if you know what to look for:

* Jeg drikker god maelk

* Ich trinke gute Milch

But I would be hard pressed to say they're more similar than Dutch:

* Ik drink goede melk

Or Frisian:

* Ik drink goede molke

* (I drink good milk)

It becomes even more obvious when you hear them spoken. But sure, your opinion might differ; especially since Dutch and German are close siblings, closer to each other than either is to English.

As someone that dabbled in learning both, Dutch was moderately easier for me. Additionally, the Dutch have the highest non-native English fluency (as a populace). Just a couple extra pieces of anecdota.

I think it's been replaced by "that", as in:

"Upon the submission of the cause the appellant made a motion to amend its assignments of error. That motion is now granted."

This notably differs from the example in OP by its position outside of the first sentence. AFAICT, your second sentence cannot function as a parenthetical like the example with "which motion".

American English generally uses "that" for restrictive clauses and "which" for relative clauses. E.g.:

> The local cafe that my dad loves has a lot of lunch options.

> The local cafe, which my dad loves, has a lot of lunch options.

But British English generally uses "which" for both:

> The local cafe which my dad loves has a lot of lunch options.

The "cannot function as a parenthetical" is essentially what a restrictive clause is, although of course the person you're replying to broke things into two sentences.

Notably, the example given by GP also cannot function as a restrictive clause, since "that" is acting as a demonstrative rather than the head of a clause:

*Upon the submission of the cause the appellant made a motion (to amend its assignments of error) that motion is now granted.

The current ungrammaticality of the original example given in OP is due to the presence of "motion" within the wh-phrase (c.f., "Which motion is now granted?"), which does not have an equivalent construct for restrictive clauses using "that".

Also: Why does / did legal writing prefer the structurally complex multipart sentence in the original article to this simpler two sentence version?

Is there some formal ambiguity in the two-sentence version which the one-sentence version does not have?

on this subject does anyone have any texts that detail the formalities and intricacies of legalese?

I have often found the writings of legal professionals especially compelling when I've encountered them informally in the wild (newspapers, articles etc) and would like to replicate it myself.

I've seen the word "said" used for the same job, at least in British English.

It sounds about right that the example they came up with was from a legal context because that's easily the most likely place I'd expect to hear this.

Which with the noun after it is rare, but in every case omitting the noun preserves the meaning while generating more commonplace sentences. I think the most common usage is "of which", in which (heh) the noun is omitted.

I use this form of "which" all the time.

You know, I tend to be a bit formal myself but I cannot imagine busting this out in conversation at all.

So...I'm pretty sure I've used "which" in this very way before.

i use which like that all the time

I would sometimes use "whose" in this situation; despite referring to an inanimate / non-person noun, it fits grammatically.

‘Whose’ here is general but takes on a slightly different genitive meaning of something belonging to (or used by, related to, etc.) the referent.

‘I saw a cat, which toy had black fur’ → the cat is a toy, and the cat-toy has black fur; vs ‘I saw a cat, whose toy had black fur’ → the cat has (owns, is playing with, etc.) a toy, and the cat's toy has black fur.

s/general/grammatical/

I do see usages of which in these cases only with the addition of prepositions to tie things together more cohesively.

Take the example case: “Upon the submission of the cause the appellant made a motion to amend its assignments of error, which motion is now granted.”

In 2023, I would expect this to read “Upon the submission of the cause the appellant made a motion to amend its assignments of error, in which motion is now granted,” where “in” is the change.

The most surprising thing I read here was that 'homicide' was a word in 1390, so older than English itself.

Yes, because like many similar words (ex. fratricide) it is derived from Latin. In this case specifically, the Latin word for manslaughter.

English has existed in one form or another for longer than that. The Cantebury Tales, in Middle English, was published before then.

And thta is just about rteadable to modern eyes. Old English like Beowulf is another language but does have some words that are still in Modern English. Old English existed by 800AD

Which 'wich?

Any article with a headline ending with Question mark is:

- unoriginal & low value

- written by a low quality author

- edited by a low quality editor

- defaults to an answer of NO

stop the question mark BS

[X] Critical of unimportant detail

[X] Did not read the article

[X] Disconnected from reality: article hits front page of HN

[X] Makes value judgements based on incomplete or irrelevant evidence

Quite impressive! Developer by any chance?

Definitely did not read the article.

If it ends in "?", I publicly question its validity and denigrate its author & editor by default.

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