Re: "Difficult" clauses

caeruleancentaur wrote:

> The point of the exercise, as I understood it, was what to do with
> all those prepositions.  I thought that if they were rearranged, it
> might make it easier.  I wasn't trying for an equivalent.
>
> "We spent all night talking about I can't remember what" is the
> original.
>
> "We spent all night talking about that which (what) I can't
> remember" places the preposition immediately before its object.
>
> "We spent all night talking, but I can't remember what it was that
> we were talking about," while it conveys the same idea, to me, adds
> more words to the sentence.  I was not interested in "paraphrasing"
> the sentence, but in "translating" it.
>
> "We spent all night talking about something I don't remember what it
> was" doesn't sound right to me.  Shouldn't there be something
> after "something": "and," a period, a semicolon?
Not a pause, but you can add an implicit "that" after "something".

I know it wasn't originally intended as a translation exercise, but I
thought it would make an interesting one.