Day 16b

I'm beginning to think English isn't a language at all. It's obviously impossible anyone could speak it. No, English is the nightmare of an insane Martian.

Here's what I mean. Take two sentences:
"The man lives in the shed."
"He is Spanish."

How do we glue these together into one sentence, making one a subordinate clause inside another? We chop them up like this:

"The man / lives / in the shed"
"He / is Spanish"

...and scramble them to produce:

"The man / who / lives in the shed / is Spanish"

Fairly simple, right? The verb phrase of the first sentence is glued using the word "who" to the verb phrase of the second, and the verb phrase of the first. We could also say;

"The man who is Spanish lives in the shed."

We use "who" to do this for people, but we can also use "that", to make:

"The man that lives in the shed is Spanish"

Now, when talking about objects, we use "which". For instance:

"The cheese was in the fridge"
"It has gone hard"

...gives us:

"The cheese which was in the fridge has gone hard."

And we can also use "that" instead here too.

It's a similar story for "where" (used for places), "whose" (for possessions) and "which" (for events), but we can't use "that" for the first two of these.

This is when things start to get complex. Sometimes you can miss out the special linking word (called a Relative Pronoun):

"The sausage [which/that] I was going to eat disappeared."

But for "Where" it's slightly different. You can change "This is the town where I grew up" to "This is the town I grew up in." You lose "where" but gain an "in", seemingly from nowhere! And you can use "which" or "that" but not "Who" or "what" instead of "where". Except you can use "what" in some dialects.

Now, there's a difference between "The man who I saw was a murderer" and "The man, who I saw, was a murderer". In the first I'm telling you something about the man (namely, that he was seen by me) and in the second I'm giving you some extra information about myself (namely, that I saw him).

And you can use "which" and "who" in the same ways. Except in the versions of the sentences that have the commas, you can't replace "who", "where" or "which" with "that", and you can't omit the relative pronoun at all. So these sentences are impossible:

"Bill, that breeds llamas, is a stamp collector."
"Sit on the pavement, the tramp used."
"Hamish, that frightens girls, splits atoms."

Oh yes, and sometimes you use "what" instead of "which" to refer to events. But most of the time you don't. See if you can work out why this is correct:

"What happened was a disaster."

...but this isn't:

"Everything what happend was a disaster."

(Except that it is acceptable in some dialects).

Assuming anyone's read this far, may I just note that it took me two hours to understand this much, and I've got twenty minutes to teach it in.

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