My rule of thumb: If I can convert the phrase to something like "I wish to thank him, then whom is correct. Both end in M!
This is wrong on so many levels, but I still use it. ;-D
It seems that your cite undermines your argument. The cite talks strictly about written English in terms of grammatical structure. It does not mention spoken English at all, nor draw a parallel between a comma and a pause in speech.
Then I guess we differ greatly on what the term “slight break” means, or how that influences speech.
Take one of the examples cited: “Mary, who has two young children, has a part-time job in the library”. If you speak that aloud, would there be a slight pause after “Mary” (and after “children”), or would you say the first part exactly the same way as if you were talking about someone named “Mary Who”?
We can look to advanced text-to-speech systems to see that there not only is “a parallel” between a comma and a slight pause in speech, but in fact a very explicitly defined one. To produce the most natural speech, Amazon Polly implements four types of pauses in speech, characterized by strength (duration): none, the pause after a comma, the pause after a sentence, and the pause after a paragraph. The strength of a pause is normally inferred from punctuation, or it can be specified with SSML tags. The developer’s guide states: "If you don’t specify an attribute to determine the pause length, Amazon Polly uses the default, which is <break strength=“medium”>, which adds a pause the length of a pause after a comma.
These are just the normal principles of everyday speech, which most of us do completely subconsciously.
Yeah, it should be “I had help from many people which I wish to thank.”
(j/k; “whom” is correct. Actually, if a rewrite would make you more comfortable, try “I had help from many people, and I would like to take a moment to thank them now.”)
o_o
>_<
o_0
Oh.
Which grammars and dictionaries describe how it should be used? ‘Cos I vote for those ones.
This is only because some high school English teachers like to clutch onto simplistic (over generalized) rules, as they’re so much easier to teach than actual rhetoric, which is extremely hard to teach, but which is what the students really need. Fine–she can feel “safer” using who and whom, but that doesn’t mean that is “absolutely not” correct, and it’s a waste of time to go on about it.
It has nothing to do with “becoming widely accepted.” Using that to refer to a person as a relative pronoun in a restrictive adjective clauses is a normal, accepted grammatical usage that goes back to the time of Shakespeare, at least:“A young man married is a man that’s marred.”
(All’s Well that Ends Well.)
“A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.”
Francis Bacon, “Of Revenge” in The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
(Perhaps Miss Morris would like to spend all the class time “correcting” Shakespeare’s relative pronouns, instead of doing something useful for the students, like actually teaching writing.)
There are other examples I could cite, but–except inside Miss Morris’ head–this is a pointless issue and it isn’t worth the effort.
There are some uses of the comma which correspond to common prosody, but others do not, and are more like abstract grammatical markers that don’t necessarily indicate speech patterns. It really depends on which usage we’re talking about. There may be fewer of the later than the former, but off the top of my head I can think of sentence initial prepositional (time) phrases, or dependent clauses that begin a sentence: *In 1941, the U.S. entered WWII.
If I knew what I wanted, I wouldn’t be here.*Either of these may or may not be spoken with a pause at the points where prescriptive mechanics requires a comma in writing. In ordinary speech they probably more often don’t have pauses.
Here we’re getting into a controversial and subjective area in which I’m on the side that says “fewer of the latter than the former” means very few of the latter indeed. I’m sure that it’s possible to come up with a rare case where a comma is necessary for readability and doesn’t reflect the prosody of the spoken language, but that would be a rare exception. I’m not denying that such exceptions exist, but “here is a case where what you claim isn’t true” doesn’t disprove the fact that what I said is generally and broadly true. And I dispute that you’re provided such examples.
In your “In 1941 …” example, I can practically hear in my head Walter Cronkite’s famous voice intoning that sentence, with a distinct and dramatic pause after the introductory clause. In common speech the pause might be weaker, but in common speech we also tend to be careless, and tend to slur our words, too. Some might say it with no pause at all, but then again, some might write it without the comma, which here is largely a matter of style.
Same deal with “If I knew what I wanted …”. It can be said with or without a weak pause, and likewise can be written with or without a comma. I would prefer to see consistency between the written form and its spoken intonation, but then, I’m a stickler for saying just what’s on the page, even if I’m saying it in my head. I suppose, that’s why I find superfluous or misplaced commas, so jarring.
Amazon Polly is one of the most advanced text to speech systems in the world and uses deep learning to create the most natural possible speech. The experts who built it defined pauses of different strengths after commas, sentences, and paragraphs. I presume they knew what they were doing.
I went to the store and bought a pear.
Vs
I went to the store, and I bought a pear.
Do you say those sentences differently? One requires a comma by most style guides. The other one does not (and adding a comma to that one, even if there is a slight pause in speech, is generally regarded as incorrect.) Either sentence can be said with a pause or without one, but there’s only one way most style guides require you to use the comma. Those examples are ones where I find “following your ear” to be particularly problematic in determining comma usage, and those are very common structures.
This is a common mistaken usage of “whom” when “who” is correct.
“I had help from many people who I wish to thank” or rephrase it “I had help from many people who I’d like to thank”
In this case, “that” would be incorrect as you are referring to people not an object.
You are Post #50 in a thread in which several people have already posted explanations of why “whom” is correct here. If you’re going to disagree with them, you need to explain what’s wrong with their explanations.
Actually, on further review… either are correct depending on usage.
In formal or written situations, “whom” is the correct pronoun to use because it appears in the object position of the verb ‘thank’ in the restrictive relative clause. “…whom I wish to thank”
In spoken english, most people often use “who” or drop the relative pronoun completely.
“I had help from many people who I wish to thank”
“I had help from many people I wish to thank”
So… if this is in a formal letter use “whom”, otherwise, in a speech or casual conversation “who” is just as acceptable and way less pretentious.
…and “that” is still wrong.
Yes, the comparison is bewildering:
is not even *close *in meaning to
much less “virtually the same thing.”
This works if “who/whom” is being used as a simple pronoun by itself, but it doesn’t work if it is the subject or object in a subordinate clause.
It’s only bewildering if you failed to read my response.
We’re in subjective territory again, but a few comments.
I don’t know if it was intentional, but those two sentences are not the same. The second one ends in an independent clause due to the addition of a subject there. In that case a comma separating the two independent clauses is good practice. And, unless I was in a hurry, if I was focused on speaking correctly I would indeed be inclined to say the second one with a slight pause between the two parts for exactly the same reason, and so would Amazon Polly. I would not pause in the first one, nor would a comma there be appropriate.
Of course, many people wouldn’t enunciate a pause in either one, and especially not in common everyday speech when we tend to run our words together and even slur them. Yet those same people might affect a different prosidy when speaking more formally, such as when giving a formal speech, or as in my reference to Walter Cronkite’s narration. So what should we make of this? Let me propose an explanation.
I think the fundamental argument here is not that the comma has mysterious multiple functions. Why complicate things when the simplest explanation will do: the comma has only one function: the separation of words, phrases, clauses, and ideas. The equivalent in oral speech is the weak pause, but in the rush of everyday speech we often neglect to do this because it usually doesn’t affect the meaning. But notice that when there is ambiguity (“the college accepted Fred, and Bill and John got turned down”) we are more careful to respect the prosidic implication of the comma. Likewise we tend to respect this role more in formal than in informal speech, but the poor hardworking comma is doing the same old job in all these cases. When commas appear in writing where there is no apparent prosidic correspondence in speech, or is apparent only in formal speech, It’s only because writing is the most formal form of communication of all.
Yes, the sentences were not supposed to be identical. That was the main point, that including the subject requires you to use a comma, and not including the subject requires you to omit the comma, according to style guides, even though, when spoken, they may both be said with or without a pause. It’s the most common punctuation error I remember having to correct back when I copy edited, and it’s because writers were relying on their ears to punctuate, rather than the style book reasons for including or omitting the comma.
I think you have it backward here.
Do you actually think that people walk around with scripts for everything they say, and then “forget” to pause at the commas in their script because they’re being “sloppy” or “neglectful”? That’s exactly what the quotation above implies.
Maybe you’re a newscaster or actor, so you see it this way, but the vast majority (over 90%, I’m sure) of human speech is unscripted. When people are talking, there isn’t some comma in their head that they’re ignoring. Nor is there some kind of command to pause at these places. They don’t pause because it’s not part of natural speech.
The comma after the sentence-initial dependent clause is not “subjective” or optional: it’s a (grammatically based) convention that appears in every style guide or grammar. Same thing with those sentence-initial prepositional phrases. When people forget to put them in (and I agree that happens a lot) they get corrected by copy editors and English teachers.
And these are not rare occurrences. Just open up any newspaper. Likewise, when we talk, we use these forms quite a lot. The fact is that, when people are speaking these phrases and clauses, they very often don’t pause at these points, and it’s not because they’re being “sloppy.” It’s because those commas are there purely as written conventions that have no bearing on the way that natural English speech has evolved.
I can understand that you would like the comma to be more consistent, and it seems to have something to do with Amazon Polly, which is a wonderful technology–I agree. But that doesn’t change these two long-time characteristics of English writing convention and English speech.
I don’t think I was clear in my last post. I’m not sure that we’re really disagreeing on all that much, and perhaps I can wrap this up with a final comment. I don’t have it backwards because that’s not actually what I was saying. I wasn’t trying to imply that we speak from scripts in our heads. That impression may have come from the fact that in this thread we were discussing various written examples and how they would be spoken.
But ultimately I think we can agree that the spoken form of language is primary, and written language strives to capture it. Written language necessarily introduces its own formalisms, like punctuation. The point I’ve been trying to make is that much of it serves the same purposes of linguistic clarity as the phonology of the spoken language, like intonation, rhythm, and the closely related concepts of pauses and chunking of word groups. Punctuation isn’t there for decoration.
And pauses and chunking in speech are frequently represented in the written language by the humble comma, or sometimes other punctuation. If there doesn’t seem to be a consistent correspondence between punctuation and prosody, it’s usually just because of stylistic choices we make in the evolution of how we speak or how we write, and probably both. With regard to your remark that “they don’t pause because it’s not part of natural speech”, note again the example I gave previously: “the college accepted Fred, and Bill and John got turned down”. When faced with a potential ambiguity, we resolve it through a combination of pausing and changes in stress and other elements, and these things occur precisely at the point that the comma appears in the written form. Where no ambiguity exists, we make stylistic choices instead, sometimes determined by the register in which we are speaking.
Oh, and the reason that Amazon Polly came up is because it’s one of the world’s leading text to speech systems, and I found the choices that the linguists and engineers made when they built it, particularly the comma pause, to be instructive about their view of the relationship between written and spoken language.
Thanks! I see the logic now.
If we’re discussing style, I personally would elide the relative pronoun entirely, and just say “…people I wish to thank.” It fits my normal speech style better. Though I might also simplify it to “…people. I wish to thank [start of list]”.