Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Multiple wh-words

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Monday, February 28, 2005, 18:47
On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 04:47 , Ph. D. wrote:

> caerulean centaur wrote:
[snip]
>> You need to explain to me this in-situ language. It seems to me >> that, regardless of emphasis, "who" is still the object of the >> verb "saw" and should be "whom" (for those of us who still use whom). > > > This has nothing to do with the distinction between "who" and "whom" > or subject and object. > > Suppose I come home. My girlfriend might say to me, > > "Who did you see at the library?"
Yep - that would be the normal word order. But if my wife came in and told me she'd seen so-and-so at the library and I didn't catch the name properly, I might well respond with: "You saw WHO at the library?" In fact, I find nothing particularly odd in: "Who saw who, where and where? " =============================================== On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 03:49 , Andy wrote:
> ***gmail warning*** > > There's nothing wrong with that sentence in the English I speak. > > Well, nothing except I would say "Who did who see?"
Now that does sound odd to me. In the colloquial English I'm familiar with, the auxiliaries 'do/does/did' are not use when the in-situ interrogatives are used. I would simply say: "Who saw who?" =============================================== BTW I get the impression that the actual use of "whom" in _spoken_ English is confined to parts of north America. Is that so? Certainly in this neck of the woods (southern UK) it would sound odd & somewhat affected in normal colloquial speech. IME it's even rare in more formal spoken modes. Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com =============================================== Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

Reply

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>