that one might wonder if it would hold. Is this grammatical?

[englishlearner777]

I was writing about some WWI poems and was stumped by my own sentence structure.

The question of reliability might arise when considering the romanticised vision of the war that one might wonder if it would hold after witnessing the full extent of human misery brought by the war.

The part in bold type is meant to modify "the romanticised vision of the war" saying that it's doubtful that it would hold against the full extent of human misery.

I can think of a way to say this in spanish: La cuestión de la veracidad puede surgir al considerar la visión romantizada de la realidad de la cual uno puede dudar si soportaría.... But I'm not even sure of it being grammatical in spanish.

 

[Rover_KE]

You'd be well advised to write less convoluted sentences.

If you can't understand what you've written, how do you expect your readers to understand it?

Alternatively, post this in the Other Languages forum and see if any member fluent in Spanish is interested in discussing it.

 

[Tarheel]

I agree with you about one thing. I don't understand your writing either.

You are perfectly capable of writing in understandable English, and I suggest that you do just that.

Please note capitalization, thus:

Spanish
English
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Chinese
Japanese

 

[jutfrank]

I agree that it's not very well expressed. Try again.

 

[englishlearner777]

You'd be well advised to write less convoluted sentences.

If you can't understand what you've written, how do you expect your readers to understand it?

Alternatively, post this in the Other Languages forum and see if any member fluent in Spanish is interested in discussing it.

I can understand what I wrote, that's why I gave a detailed explanation of what I meant to do: use a postmodifier to express my personal opinion on the question of whether it would hold, etc. I don't mean to be rude but if the people replying to my post are just going to say more or less study more I'd rather they didn't reply at all and you would delete my post for using spanish straightaway.

 

[Tarheel]

@englishlearner777 The main lesson you learn in my humble opinion is to simplify. You don't need to study more. You need to write shorter, simpler sentences. Also, I am not sure what you mean by "to hold" there.

 

[Holmes]

The question of reliability might arise when considering the romanticised vision of the war that one might wonder if it would hold after witnessing the full extent of human misery brought by the war.

The part in bold type is meant to modify "the romanticised vision of the war" . . .

The relative clause is malformed because it has a resumptive pronoun: "it." Normally, a relative clause has a "gap" rather than a resumptive pronoun: He is the man who I think __ likes her (not: *He is the man who I think he likes her).

Yet it's understandable why you used a resumptive pronoun in your own sentence, since the version with a "gap" in the relative clause would have been even more ungrammatical than what you wrote:

*the vision that one might wonder if ___ would hold

The problem with the relative clause is that "if it would hold . . ." is an embedded question, and an element in an embedded question cannot be relativized or questioned. It's what generative syntacticians call an "island." Here are a couple of easier examples of the same type of ungrammaticality:

*He is the man who I don't know whether met you.
*Who do you wonder if is going?