All the following statements are grammatically correct. And these examples are very, very frequently handled incorrectly in print these days. You may have to read this several times: there is no simple way to explain everything at once, for those that have forgotten transitive and intransitive verbs and what takes objects and what can’t. But once you realize WHAT the subject of the who-clause is—you’ve got it. Also note: who/whose/whom/which/of which AND the substitute ‘that’ are ALL the word ‘who’ in various permutations.
Ilisidi had adjusted her schedule. She did not say who she had moved.
She did not say whose meeting she had moved.
She did not say who was coming.
Who shall I say is calling?
Whom do you wish to see?
To whom should I address this question?
The trick in figuring out who-whom is at once simple and difficult: but first let’s understand the who-clause. It’s called a RELATIVE clause because it uses a ‘relative pronoun’—ie, who/whose/whom or which or even ‘that’.
Note that it is a CLAUSE, and not a Phrase. The difference between clause and phrase is simple: a clause could easily be a whole sentence: a phrase is just a group of words. There are dependent and independent clauses. A Relative Clause is by nature a variety of Dependent Clause, because it begins with a connective word—in this case not ‘and’ or ‘but’, but ‘who’, a ‘relative pronoun’, so named because it ‘relates’ [carries-back/connects] to something outside the clause. Ergo—dependent.
Got it? All Relative Clauses are dependent, just because they contain that connection and are not fully independent. [Should you wonder what is an independent clause, your typical short sentence is an independent clause.]
But let’s get back to our simple and confusing little who-clause, at issue above.
How to tell whether to use Who, or Whom…
The secret? Find the subject in the who-clause.
Look at example #1: She did not say who she had moved. What’s the subject of the little clause? The answer is: SHE. SHE had moved. So what the heck is WHO? The trick is—words are left out, or ‘understood’ to be there. [The technical word for a dropout is an ‘ellipsis.’]
The full clause would be: who [it was that] she had moved. It’s, in other words, a complex little bitch of an expression, two little clauses pasted together with words missing. The word WHO is the [God help us!] the Predicate Noun of an Intransitive Verb [this means it’s equivalent to a subject, and is always in Subject [Nominative] Case] of the first little clause; and SHE is the subject of the second. This nasty little trick of expression happens a lot with WHO, just by the nature of what it does for a living.
Bitchy trick #2—the verb IS [am, is, are, was, were, be, been] is ‘intransitive’, meaning a ‘forceless’ verb. It doesn’t ever take an object, so WHO could not possibly be in the Objective case [whom]. [ “I am I, Don Quixote!”] So though HAD MOVED is a transitive [force] verb and CAN take an object, in this case—there’s no object in its clause for it to take.
#2: She did not say whose meeting she had moved. Again, SHE is still the subject. But the first little clause has changed: The full expression is: She did not say WHOSE [possessive] meeting [ellipsis: it was that] she had moved. MEETING is the antecedent [word described] for the ‘it was’. This very nasty little combo is TWO who-clauses pasted together with words left out: thus: she did not say whose meeting it was that [=which] she had moved….MEETING belongs to the first one, its subject being IT. She had moved: subject is she and the object of ‘moved’ is the neuter who, ie, WHICH or THAT, a relative pronoun describing ‘meeting’.
#3: She did not say who was coming. In this case it’s straightforward: the only available subject for the forceless verb ‘was coming’ is WHO. It’s in subject form. You could still expand it out to ‘She did not say who it was that was coming,’ but because the verb is the intransitive ‘is’ there’s no chance of it needing to be ‘whom’.
#4: A trio of little sentences now: memorize these, as THE most commonly screwed-up high English currently in issue.
a: Who shall I say is calling? This is CORRECT. “I” is the subject of ‘shall say’. “Who” is the subject of “is calling”. There is, again, a fallout. The full expression is: Who [is it/ that] I shall say is calling? So it’s exactly the same as sentence #1. ON THE OTHER HAND: you can argue that “I shall say” is parenthetical. This one has been driven around the block by various grammarians with various arguments…justly so.
b: Whom do you wish to see? The OTHER most screwed-up question. “YOU” is the subject of “wish”. But now you have that rascally “who-word” as the OBJECT of the OBJECT. The object of wish is TO SEE. [This is an infinitive: an ‘infinite’ verb, that can act like a noun—WHILE taking its own object.] And yep, WHOM is the OBJECT of that infinitive TO SEE. In this case you have a choice, and could justify ‘who’ by saying there is an elliptical ‘who is it whom’ I shall say is calling? —but this is needlessly convolute, and sometimes you just throw up your hands and shorten the damn thing.
c. To whom should I address this question? “I” is the subject of SHOULD ADDRESS, “this question” is its object, and “TO WHOM” is a simple prepositional phrase belonging [adverbially] to the verb “I should address.”
Note: English is so confusingly bitchy to sort, because it has eighteen tense-forms [most languages get by with 6], and constructs all of them out of spare parts. In Latin, for instance, “he will be arriving” is simply one word: adveniet. The base of the verb is ADVENI- The ending has an slight shift for the future-ness of it and the -t is the “he, she, it” form. English goes berserk when it has to break up that verb to insert other information. Will he actually be arriving late? Latin just says: Tarde enim advenietne. -ne is the question mark. Enim means actually/you’re kidding.
Well, English borrowed all its who-rules from Latin, which neatly packages things, as above, and turned it into a nightmare due to its eighteen-tense diced-up verbs. Small wonder we get confused!
While you may be correct on all of these examples, please don’t make things too complicated. One of the reasons I like your books is your use of language. I am afraid I have forgotten most of the little formal grammar I have ever learned and have to depend on whether things sound correct.
Are these things even taught in school today? I hope so.
Lol: now and again I have to, when I’m writing Ilisidi. It’s not necessary to parse what she says, just read it. But I have to get it right. She’d be very put out if I made her make a grammatical error.
“Ilisidi had adjusted her schedule. She did not say whom she had moved.” why is this version NOT correct? is the missing bit always missing? how does one know it’s missing?
Lol—purplejulian, you can indeed make a credible, argument for your version on the grounds of brevity, and on the analogy of Whom do you wish to see? v. Who is it whom you wish to see? (another of those inheritances from Latin via the French habit of double-statement [qui est-ce que vous voulez voir—who is it that/whom you wish to see?]and if I were the instructor, I would not count your sentence wrong, in fact—which shows how very open to interpretation the form is. However–[you should never begin a sentence with ‘however,’ either. 😆 ] —however, I stubbornly say, She did not say [whom she had moved] has the [perhaps indefensible] feeling of missing a verb, notably ‘is[it was]’. So yes, this is the sort of sentence over which English majors go out and do lunch, because you can argue it this way and that.
I bet you loved parsing sentences in grade school. So did I. And I took 4 years of high school Latin and one in college, which, as you know, also helps sorting things out. But I fear things have gone downhill for me since then. I tend to avoid “whom” unless I am absolutely certain it’s correct. But I’m very good with “I” and “me.”
That’s why ‘that’ is so popular, although it really should be reserved for inanimate objects…
The best way to prepare oneself for WRITING characters that use primly proper English is to do a reading immersion in an older book, Trollope, say, or Austen.
Seriously, don’t think that because you’re writing a period piece you should fall back utterly on the old rules of grammar, because there’s no end to it. You cannot BE Jane Austen. And your surrounding text can be somewhat looser, say, than the dialogue of a particularly prim character. But you do need to be well-enough grounded in grammar to know that a certain slang didn’t exist in the period, that a certain scientific concept didn’t exist, or that a certain turn of phrase is American and you have an Englishman living prior to the 1600’s. This is where the Oxford English Dictionary can be quite useful to a writer, because they say WHEN a particular word was first used in a given meaning. As a very silly instance, you would not say that Sir Lancelot was jazzed when he saw Guinevere, nor would you say that he thought Guinevere had brains…she might have wits, at that period, but most people were not clear on the function of the grey stuff they considered a food item.
I don’t believe in trying to write forsoothly, ie, all the ways to thees and thys, but casting the language in a kind of time-neutrality is helpful in preserving the dramatic illusion.
After all, you may believe that most of the dialogue is simply translated, as it would be translated out of say, Russian, or French, into somewhat more modern English. What you want to do as a writer is to create a comfortable illusion of time-past, not imitate William Shakespeare’s language.
So I am at peace with the changes in the language: it’s part of the process, and one day the undeclined [not-changing] ‘that’ will probably replace most of the who-whom functions. Who-whom is not a very useful distinction.
On the other hand, I am NOT at peace with the loss of the subjunctive, which carries important meanings, and without which our language will be less expressive.
I was fascinated by this article – http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/25/author-present-tense-john-mullan – you know, I never even noticed that the authors he mentioned (amongst others; Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Hilary Mantel) used the present tense, just shows that when writing is good you don’t notice the nuts and bolts. Other writers whom (?) I shall not mention have offended/annoyed me by using the present tense in a very noticeable fashion, badly.
I learned a slightly different trick to figure out who/whom (I forget where, but it was fairly recent as I count such things, so it may have been at university.) This is to re-cast the sentence as a straight, active sentence and then figure out the subject/object roles from there.
English uses a lot of ‘fronting’ of words and phrases for emphasis, and questions nearly always use it. F’example, from your examples above: “Who shall I say is calling?” If you re-cast this as a simpler active sentence, the result is “I shall say who is calling.” “Who is calling” is an embedded sentence serving as the object of the transitive verb “say”. Because “Who” is the subject of the embedded sentence, however, it remains in the nominative case, whether fronted or not.
Compare “Whom do you wish to see?” where the re-cast sentence reads, “You wish to see whom.” Note the sudden appearance of ‘do’ in the fronted version, and its disappearance in the non-fronted version. I suspect this is because of English quirks re: SVO word order, but can’t say for sure (it’s been a while since university linguistics classes.)
I’m not so sure that this trick will work everywhere, however. I keep looking at the first example above, “She did not say who she had moved” and keep getting “She did not say [that] she had moved who”, and therefore my head keeps telling me “whom” for that last “who”. It might work better to think of it as a sentence with two embedded sentences, one nested inside the oher, with the first “She” as the main subject, “who” as the subject of the first embedded sentence, and “she” as the subject of the second embedded sentence, which is nested inside the first embedded sentence. Ergo, you would get “She did not say [who (she had moved)]”, where there are a lot of ellisions, namely “She did not say [who {it was that} (she had moved {who})]. In short, “who” is in the sentence twice, but since English drops a lot of grammar where it can get away with it, “who” is elided as the object of the embedded sentence which is the object of the embedded sentence which “who” is serving as the subject for, which embedded sentence is itself serving as the object for the main sentence which begins as “She did not say…”
I’m sure there’s a joke in here about Ilisidi’s convoluted means of confusing her enemies, but I’ll leave that as implied.
Ruadhan, if you break out CJ’s sentence fully, it comes out to “She did not say who it was (that) she had moved” or something to that effect. Ignore here the “that” does not refer to people. At least, that’s how I’m parsing it.
CJ’s NOTE: through the magical powers of admin: I have corrected that example. I get dizzy after too much editing. 🙂 Thank you, Raesean and Ruadhan, for good argument here!
Aagh! Now I’m thinking I should dig out my old transformational grammar book. I’m having a vague recollection of special cases re: embedded sentences where which/who/what/that are serving as the sentence heads…
I think I’ll skip that. At least for tonight! Instead, I’ll comment on the seeming interchangeability of which/that/who. English differentiates between animate and inanimate, but it’s also a trade language which has been routinely simplified for the purposes of talking to neighbors who don’t speak the same language we do. I believe one of these simplifications is to over-use ‘that’: IE, “He was the one that brought the beer” vs. the more correct “He was the one who brought the beer”. See also “That car was the one that hit the lamp post” vs. “That car was the one which hit the lamp post”. The sentences convey the same meaning in each case, if a bit awkwardly in the ‘that’ variations. However, this awkwardness is not enough to overcome the advantage of learning one rule over two. Or three. Or…
All solutions valid only in prescriptivist English classes. Any situation in which descriptivist language is being used voids any and all other rules, including this one. Ain’t is obnoxious, but also inevitable.
Another result of English constructing tense forms “from spare parts” is that you can split an infinitive in English. Latin infinitives are, of course, unsplittable. Many commentators have suggested that the rule against splitting English infinitives comes from this fact.
I read somewhere, long ago, that what we call English grammar is actually Latin grammar applied to the English language…
What thinkst thou?
Fairly well true. The Greek scholars had made a study of their own language. Romans’ highest education, their equivalent of the advanced degree, involved Greek and Greek tutors: it was important, in Caesar’s day, to study with a Greek teacher. The Romans liked to create systems: the Greeks liked to study them. So it was fairly natural that the Romans began ‘organizing’ their own language, and that Roman scholars began figuring out a system of regularization that would inform the various peoples of their Empire how to learn Latin. There was actually a reward system built into their politics, that if a city or state was declared to have Latinity, and formed its laws like Roman laws and conducted its business in Latin, they were dealt with in a favorable way, and were given special tax breaks, etc, and special consideration in affairs that might involve them.
So a lot of people wanted to learn Latin—it was systematized, and gave you a business advantage in trade, and with it you could talk to anybody and argue with officials. So wherever they went, this ‘system’ went.
Early England was a mishmash of tribal dialects in the Celtic family, probably varying quite a bit; and then the Romans, who brought Latin to the cities; then as the Romans faded, the Germanic dialects, as the Vikings came in and settled York; and then Christianity came in with re-introduced Latin as a way for everybody to understand each other. French and Spanish and Italian were developing, all offshoots of Latin; the Moors came in, and the Carolingians fought back—again, Latin was an organizational tool for them; and part of the Church they supported.
So when anybody was actually taught to read and write, it was in Latin, which had a ‘system’ for learning it, and texts that told you how it worked; and people naturally applied these rules to their own tongues. Some nobles spoke Latin, but NOT the language of the people, who weren’t educated, and had no rules.
When the native languages [reshaped Latin in the first place, in the south; and Germanic in the north; not to mention the Slavs, whose language is also related to Latin] began to try to formalize into languages of trade and currency, there had to be rules.
Who had the system? Latin had the system.
And that’s why we use Latin rules to this day, because if we didn’t, it would be even harder to learn other languages of the huge group that is semi-related. We still struggle when we have to learn, say, Chinese or Arabic, but at least with the grasp of some sort of system, you go into it with ready-made hooks to hang concepts on—this is a noun, this is a verb, Sanskrit has more cases than Latin, German has fewer, etc.
can I just put in there, CJ, the germanic part is the base of our English language, but it’s not Viking, it’s Anglish! or anglo-saxon – you can say whole sentences in perfectly good English without using a word that has a french or latin origin. have been watching some wonderful history programmes on the telly recently – there was a reading of a written interview with a ploughman (“Earthling” someone who works with the earth!) from pre-norman conquest, about how he had to get up early and get his oxen ready and it was very hard work, because he was not free … and most of the words perfectly recognisable.
There’s Old Norse behind the Angles and the Saxons, in my recollection: no, good old Hengist and Horsa, and that lot were the major influx linguistically, but there is also Old Norse behind the very large establishment at York, which was finally swallowed up by the AngloSaxons because other Nordic authorities thought THEY should own it—I think it’s still Old Norse at that stage, but maybe not. From Wiki, regarding the Danelaw: “The Danish laws held sway in the Kingdom of Northumbria and Kingdom of East Anglia, and the lands of the Five Boroughs of Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln.
The prosperity of the Danelaw, especially Eoforwic (Danish JórvÃk, modern York), led to its becoming a target for later Viking raiders. Conflict with Wessex and Mercia sapped the strength of the Danelaw. The waning of its military power together with the Viking onslaughts led to its submission to Edward the Elder in return for protection. It was to be part of his Kingdom of England, and no longer a province of Denmark, as the English laid final claim to it.”
Linguistically, yes, there’s a lot more A/S in English, but I’m thinking it’s descended from Old Norse.
We have some Norse words, and the different accent in the North of England, with a sprinkling of dialect words, reflects the Danelaw, but I think the Anglo Saxons were a much longer term more deeply entrenched invasion, reflected in language and DNA. don’t forget, the centre of power in the UK always has been, and remains in the South; that danelaw line is almost the same as the north south divide. here on the north coast of East Anglia, we have a mixture of placenames – Bale, my village’s name comes from Bath Leigh, meaning a spring in a wood – anglo saxon. the next two villages are Gunthorpe – viking – and hindringham – saxon. so it wasn’t a complete takeover. On the other hand our local dialect favours a strong glottal stop and a double negative, which apparently is very danish.
Michael Wood is currently presenting a wonderful programme about one village right in the centre of England – Kibworth. they have dug test pits in everybody’s garden and are looking at documentary evidence and archaeology, DNA, place names …. Kibworth was just inside the Danelaw, and its name, Kibbe’s Worth, apparently indicates it probably belonged to a danish minor royal; all Offa’s family had similar names, and worth means an enclosed area. there is a local stream with a name exactly the same as a river still called the same thing in what was Angle-land – wherever that is in N Germany. so a right mixture! fascinating.
I’ll be interested to see that program when it gets here. I recall getting so confused in my first bout with world history between the Anglo-Saxons, Hengist, Horsa, and what-not—and then when I started doing genealogy, and researching specific people, I found an amazing lot of connection between the continent and Mercia and Wessex. Trade was surely going on. Certainly there were marriages and alliances, some of which just go under the curtain of real obscurity. Not to mention Wales—all these people that are NOT in the history that’s taught (especially to Americans)—but that are recorded in genealogies, along with their origins, a snippet of their history, and their connection to other areas. Some of it is probably confused as heck (family tales of relationships are not always accurate, even in a few generations of my own) but what is important is that these people were strongly and personally connected in ways you just wouldn’t think by looking at the maps and reading about some battle in a book. I’m fascinated by just what you mention, the persistence of residence in one spot, over vast tracts of time.
Where I lived, in Oklahoma, my land title reflected a situation only going back 70-odd years, and including very little before that: the area was mostly wild thicket with patches of prairie and buffalo range, before it may have had connection to the MesoAmerican civilizations, via the Spiro Mound people. But that was so pot-hunted reconstructing it is very difficult; and the tribes that live in the state now were either relocated after the war of 1812 (Napoleonic Wars) or moved after the Civil War, during subsequent Indian Wars.
Here in Washington, we own land that is a little removed from an Indian burial, and the settlers in the state have a brief history going back to 1850, but before that, it’s all native American coastal and plains tribes oral tradition and archaeology going back to the dispute over Kennewick Man, and whether he was related to any tribe currently here. The history here is a little closer to present, because the same tribes have lived here for thousands of years, and have legends that may reflect the Ice Age melt floods.
I support the Endangered Language Fund, an organization dedicated to recording and preserving indigenous languages before they go extinct. One of my students wanted to learn the language from her Cheyenne grandmother, but the grandmother refused to teach her, and died with that knowledge, leaving the daughter always longing to have known it. It’s an emotional issue among native Americans, involving religion, among other things, and the feeling that you can’t have just part of the culture. But the ELF is working with the elders to try to get cooperation and understanding; and has spread out to other areas where indigenous populations are in danger of losing their languages. They’re small, and their grants frequently consist of a recorder and local-standard living expenses, but they are doing something about saving several thousand years of human experience.
I love anything Michael Wood does, and this test pit thing is done in lots of places – I would love to do it here, but it does happen every summer in a neighbouring village. the programme is called Michael Wood’s History of England
IIRC, there are three branches of Germanic in the Indo-European language tree (or at least, in the tree I’m most familiar with. Scholars are still debating the exact relationships.) They can be considered East, West, and North Germanic. East Germanic is equal to Gothic, and is considered an extinct branch. North Germanic is the Scandinavian languages–Danish, Norwegian, Swedish. And West Germanic is German, Dutch, Flemish… and English.
We have a LOT of Norse loan words, though, and we borrowed some more than once; f’instance, the word ‘scip’ meaning ‘ship’ was borrowed lo, about a millennia ago (about the time of the Danelaw, I think), and then borrowed again several centuries later as ‘skip’, which we use to mean a smaller boat that is usually rowed with oars, vs. the much broader meaning we use for ‘ship’.
Yes, sk –> sh. Compare k –> ch, as in the change from ‘kirk’ to ‘church’. That’s how you know it was borrowed twice, and about when; the first borrowing happened before the phonetic shift.
I love phonetics. 🙂
Ah, yes. The good old transformations. We had some huge strings, back in Comparative Linguistics, when we were handed a word in Sanskrit and told to project it to Old Norse, or the reverse, to derive it. The mind-boggling thing is that the migration of sounds forward and backward in the human mouth (which helps govern HOW things are pronounced) is so regular it can be predicted.
There’s a branch of study called glottochronology, which attempts to deal with the rate of such change, and use it to date the migration and contact points of pre-literate tribes, primarily across Europe, in my experience, but perhaps into the Sino-Tibetan lot.
The deal is, for those of you who didn’t take linguistics, is if you wanted to take French, and I were instructing, the first thing I would tell you is to move your entire ‘center of pronunciation’ from the back of your mouth to just behind your teeth. The British accent, eg, is slightly more forward than the American one, and Italian just a shade further back from the teeth than French, etc. You can modify somebody’s accent in one sitting if you can teach them WHERE in the mouth to pronounce the words.
Well, languages change in this regard: cf. English and American accents. We have moved further back in 200 years. Now there’s nowhere for us to go but a shade further back, or to start migrating forward again. If you do not have a literate population, the degree of shift over time is somewhat constant…give or take the influx of or prolonged contact with speakers of another dialect or another language. Dating that rate of change and figuring out the contacts and duration of contact is glottochronology. [language-time-study].
UGh!!!!!!!!! i HATED grammer class/section of the year in english class!!!!! UGH UGH UGH! 😉 too many rules/permutations of rules. i’ll stick to cooking glass and the occasional website design ;P ms. cherryh, your use of the english language in your books is always sensible. now if the local newpaper “journalists” could write as well as you my husband would make a lot less nasty comments – and english is his 2nd language ;P
D
Worse is coming, Dee. The proliferation of small presses and print on demand is putting out some books where the spelling and grammar are somewhere south of the local newspaper.
I do suggest if you are contemplating putting out a book—f’ gosh sakes, bribe a friendly English teacher with a steak dinner and do not rely on your spell checker to catch things! Hopping and hoping may both be correctly spelled, but they are not interchangeable!
I’m beginning to think there could easily be niche freelance work for good editors to edit works that are to be published either as e-books or from small presses. It’s not just the small presses that have problems; some of the major ones put out really revolting prose that even I with a Maths degree can recognise.
I’m waiting for the day that an experienced editor sets up to do e-books, and I do not think that Amazon, among others, is anywhere near there. Right now, anybody who is skilled in language could do a great service to some of these new wildcat publications. It’s pretty scary out there in pub-on-demand-land.
My FiL used to work for Random House, HBJ, and a few others as an editor, but was downsized several years ago. He now does just that — independent editing. I’m sure he would be more than happy to tackle e-books! Now we just need a way to connect him with those people who require his services…
I think I actually read through the entire grammar section of english classes, although I vaguely remember diagramming sentences. Totally unrelated reading of course, I’d already discovered sci-fi. I read enough that I learned what sounded correct and managed to wing it successfully. As long as I surfaced often enough with the correct answer, my teacher usually let me get away with being lost a few million miles away.
Alexander Zoltai:
I read somewhere, long ago, that what we call English grammar is actually Latin grammar applied to the English language…
A slightly better way to put it would be that the traditional study of English grammar is derived from the study of Latin grammar. That is, when medieval and Renaissance scholars wanted to analyze European languages, they reached for Latin (and, to a lesser degree, Greek) as a reference. This tradition persisted in some senses through the 19th Century, and most of the common discussions of grammar you see are still based on a 19th Century model, which tries to describe English (or French or German…) in terms of Latin. This applies to both the terminology (“nominative”, “conjugation”, “tense”, “pronoun”, etc.) and to the analysis itself.
(Modern linguistics has moved on from this, and can sometimes be confusing to those of us raised on the 19th Century model. For example, modern linguists apparently like to use “tense” in a very restrictive sense: instances where the form of the verb itself changes (“sing” vs “sang”), rather than when auxiliary words are used [“will sing”, “could sing”]. So Latin still has six “tenses”, but modern English only has two: the present and the simple past. See here for a nice, comprehensible discussion.)
English grammar itself — that is, the set of actual rules for creating and modifying words and arranging them into valid phrases and clauses — has very little influence from Latin (the primary Latin influence on English is vocabulary, often via Medieval French); such similarities as exist are almost always a reflection of their common ancestry (English and Latin being both Indo-European languages). The who/whom distinction, for example, comes from the Old English nominative (hwa) and dative (hwam) forms (there was a separate accusative form in Old English, which disappeared); the similarity to Latin is simply a result of both languages being descended from Proto-Indo-European, which had a total of eight or nine cases (including nominative, accusative, and dative).
Hmm… haven’t figured out the peculiar form for HTML links yet. The reference I meant to include for what modern linguists mean by “tense” is this:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/tense.html
Thanks, C. J., for that primer on Latin grammar and the English language.
I’m going to be publishing the book I’m working on in print (POD) and, through the same publisher (FastPencil), in e-format.
I know I need other eyes on the manuscript yet I struggle to survive on a small military pension.
Your treat-an-English-teacher-to-a-steak-dinner is intriguing but affording the steak dinner is beyond me.
Any creative ideas for enlisting the aid of an editor without using cold cash?
Hey, the best thing is to a) run it through a spellchecker and note what it WANTS to change, but run a file comparison with an UNCHANGED file to be sure it’s not making spellchecker mistakes (which are really frequent). Do the same with a grammar checker like Grammatik (which is really lousy with fiction!) THEN figure it’s pretty clean.
And then rely on the fact that English teachers like to read, anyway, and will enjoy the respect for his skills: buy the guy a beer, and just flatter the daylights out of him and he’ll probably do it for a hamburger. You surely have somebody among your acquaintances who’s grammatically accurate, or if you don’t, start cultivating such a person. You’ll have a new friend and just mention him in the dedication, and he’ll likely be very happy.
Besides, I see no problem in the English you write in comments, so I doubt you will have a big problem.
One additional trick: your eye can race too fast. When you read aloud you’re more apt to catch problems. Read your book into a tape recorder and play it back while you drive or do some other mind-occupying chore, and you’ll shed that familiarity with it, so you can catch mistakes.
Have you thought of joining a barter network? I know of at least one very large one here in NE Oklahoma. Friends of mine have been members for years and use it extensively. It is well organised with 1099-B’s (proceeds from brokerage or barter income) produced for Uncle Sam at the end of the year.
Again, C. J., thanks for your comments!
I have been reading my work, chapter by chapter, as I write them.
I’m doing three chapters a week now and will have a full “decent shape” draft by the end of October. Then, it’s back at it with what I imagine will be what you call a rolling rewrite 🙂
Working on finding bribable editor types by using FastPencil to post my chapters.
This whole novel experience is extremely novel 🙂
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tulrose, great idea!
As we have been discussing Latin here, I thought I’d share a recent discovery. The Finnish Radio broadcasts the news in Latin: . You can read the headlines at the url and click on links to hear the news. My Latin is sufficiently rusty that it sounds familiar but mostly not understandable. C.J., I should very much like to hear what you think of this.
Looks like I garbled the html. The url above is hidden; it’s http://www.yle.fi/radio1/tiede/nuntii_latini/ or you can click of the highlighted area above.
It’s even a pretty good Latin accent! Marvelous!
@Chondrite, all he’d have to do is establish an online publishing house and be careful what he accepted to publish. It’d cost him next to nothing to set up, and if he took a percentage of book sales as the publisher, say 15 percent, he could turn it into a profit-making operation…nothing to get rich from, for sure, not in the startup—a case of don’t quit your day job. But it could grow. It’s a lot of work. There are a lot of people who have a good story, but who sorely need an editor.