philo2009
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2009
- Member Type
- Academic
- Native Language
- British English
- Home Country
- UK
- Current Location
- Japan
I should like to take issue with those who, in a recent (now closed) thread, chose to defend the grammaticality of the construction *you, who has... as opposed to formally correct you, who have....
The grounds for this assertion are, apparently, that relative pronoun 'who' is to be regarded as being an invariably third-person pronoun, and so, irrespective of the second-person 'you' that precedes it, it should clearly govern the verb in the third person singular - this same argument presumably being invoked to justify *I, who eats,..., *I, who is,..., *I, who knows....
As if consideration of such horribly, manifestly ungrammatical locutions as those were not sufficient to make such users at least pause to examine their reasoning, they go on to claim that, despite its supposed invariability as to person, relative 'who' is nevertheless variable as to number, and consequently do not insist on *We/they, who eats,..., *We/they, who is..., or *We/they, who knows.... , but allow We/they, who eat,..., We/they, who are..., We/they, who know...., thereby, it would seem, arbitrarily deigning to confer on the antecedent pronoun when it is plural a bearing on the form of the verb that was mysteriously denied to it when singular!
The root of this sadly commonplace misprision is not hard to see: confusion has arisen between the interrogative pronoun 'who' - an invariably 3rd-person form - and its relative namesake, leading to the assumption that, because we say e.g.
Who has my keys?
we must also say
*You, who has my keys, must return them to me!
rather than
You, who have...
for, in English as in all its Indo-European sibling languages, relative pronouns, having NO fixed person or number, govern the verb entirely according to the person and number of their antecedent.
Thus, we get I, who am..., you, who are..., he, who is..., we, who are..., they, who are... (cf. Lat. ego, qui...sum..., Fr. moi, qui suis..., Germ. ich, der ich...bin...,** etc.), the correctness of we, who are... being shown clearly to be determined, not by any supposedly 'inbuilt' syntactic feature of 'who', but purely and simply by that of the 'we' that precedes it!
I would ask anyone who remains unconvinced to consider for a moment the wording of the Lord's Prayer, which commences, you will recall,
Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name,...
'Our Father' here is, needless to say, a simple vocative, standing in apposition to the true antecedent of the relative pronoun, an ellipted 'thou'. In other words, the passage above actually means
Our Father, Thou who art in Heaven,...
Now, the 17th-century scholars responsible for the translation of the prayer may well have used forms that are now archaic, yet their grasp of English grammar was - I think you will find! - impeccable, and the grammatical principle at stake here (underlined above) remains as incontrovertible today as it was four hundred years ago.
So, if you have ever paused in an idle moment to wonder why, despite the fact that the word 'is' has existed since long before the Reformation, we do not say
*Our Father, who is in Heaven,...
, now you know!
(N.B. ** In German, first- and second-person antecedents of a relative pronoun are conventionally repeated before the verb.)
The grounds for this assertion are, apparently, that relative pronoun 'who' is to be regarded as being an invariably third-person pronoun, and so, irrespective of the second-person 'you' that precedes it, it should clearly govern the verb in the third person singular - this same argument presumably being invoked to justify *I, who eats,..., *I, who is,..., *I, who knows....
As if consideration of such horribly, manifestly ungrammatical locutions as those were not sufficient to make such users at least pause to examine their reasoning, they go on to claim that, despite its supposed invariability as to person, relative 'who' is nevertheless variable as to number, and consequently do not insist on *We/they, who eats,..., *We/they, who is..., or *We/they, who knows.... , but allow We/they, who eat,..., We/they, who are..., We/they, who know...., thereby, it would seem, arbitrarily deigning to confer on the antecedent pronoun when it is plural a bearing on the form of the verb that was mysteriously denied to it when singular!
The root of this sadly commonplace misprision is not hard to see: confusion has arisen between the interrogative pronoun 'who' - an invariably 3rd-person form - and its relative namesake, leading to the assumption that, because we say e.g.
Who has my keys?
we must also say
*You, who has my keys, must return them to me!
rather than
You, who have...
for, in English as in all its Indo-European sibling languages, relative pronouns, having NO fixed person or number, govern the verb entirely according to the person and number of their antecedent.
Thus, we get I, who am..., you, who are..., he, who is..., we, who are..., they, who are... (cf. Lat. ego, qui...sum..., Fr. moi, qui suis..., Germ. ich, der ich...bin...,** etc.), the correctness of we, who are... being shown clearly to be determined, not by any supposedly 'inbuilt' syntactic feature of 'who', but purely and simply by that of the 'we' that precedes it!
I would ask anyone who remains unconvinced to consider for a moment the wording of the Lord's Prayer, which commences, you will recall,
Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name,...
'Our Father' here is, needless to say, a simple vocative, standing in apposition to the true antecedent of the relative pronoun, an ellipted 'thou'. In other words, the passage above actually means
Our Father, Thou who art in Heaven,...
Now, the 17th-century scholars responsible for the translation of the prayer may well have used forms that are now archaic, yet their grasp of English grammar was - I think you will find! - impeccable, and the grammatical principle at stake here (underlined above) remains as incontrovertible today as it was four hundred years ago.
So, if you have ever paused in an idle moment to wonder why, despite the fact that the word 'is' has existed since long before the Reformation, we do not say
*Our Father, who is in Heaven,...
, now you know!
(N.B. ** In German, first- and second-person antecedents of a relative pronoun are conventionally repeated before the verb.)
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