Re: CHAT: which's

Roger Mills scripsit:

> What were some of the citations???
Go to http://www.google.com and type "which's" into the search box, and
you will see what I saw.  With the advent of the Web, and Google to search it,
corpus linguistics (at least the lexical part of it) is now possible on an
unprecedented scale and essentially free to everybody.  Furthermore, the Web
provides a huge resource of *unedited* text which formerly simply did not
exist -- almost all corpuses were drawn from printed sources or transcripts
of broadcasts, both of which are basically edited text.  The nearest
approximation would have been a corpus drawn from personal letters, and
who would have the resources (or the chutzpah) to create such a thing?

> Nevertheless, even if 20,000,000 say it is right, it is still wrong.
Prescriptively, of course, I agree with you:  "which's" as an inanimate
possessive relative pronoun is shuddersome, and as a spelling of "which is"
it's just pointless.

> it I wonder what Fowler has to say on the subject, Strunk
> and White, the Chicago Manual; even that marvel of modern academic
> turgidity, the MLA manual.
Probably not a word: they never even dreamed of it.

> Possible exs IMHO:
> "...a metal whose properties are unknown..."
> "...a metal of which the properties are unknown..." or
> "...a metal the properties of which are unknown..."
> *******"...a metal which's properties are unknown..."
I prefer #2 or #3, depending on the phase of the moon.

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_