It's all relative
What is wrong with the following sentence (other than the obvious heartbreak): “The thing is, is John just doesn’t love me anymore” ?
It’s the fake relative pronoun. A relative pronoun, obviously, is a word that begins a relative clause. In the sentence just previous to this one, the word is “that;” essentially, this pronoun melds two sentences, “a relative pronoun is a word” and “the word connects two relative clauses,” into one. Other such pronouns in modern English usage are who, whom, whose and which, as you no doubt know from grammar class.
Correctly, the opening example should be “the thing is that John doesn’t love me,” or merely the invisible “the thing is, John doesn’t love me.” Over the years, however, I’ve noticed people inserting an extra “is” in sentences like this because their brain tells them (assumedly) that something is missing from the more natural, more colloquial relative clause “, John doesn’t love me.” In many languages, one needs a relative pronoun at all times; it is not optional (C’est que John me n’aime plus) like it sometimes is in English. This option appears to cause confusion. Should there be something more? What if we just repeat “is”?
In the end I can’t pretend to know the motivation of the human brain, but I do find this phenomenon interesting. I predict that in the future, we may begin to see “is” labeled as a dialectical relative pronoun, much like the “what” found, for example, in archaic rural outposts of the UK: “The boy what eats more meat gets more dessert!”
As a side note, from the quick search I did on the internet, I did not see any research on this subject. I’m totally calling it, then.
Ah, “the thing is is that” is one of my pet peeves!
I found this reference: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_work.asp?id=36575
I’m sure there’s more stuff out there.
Patrick
Posted by Patrick McLoughlin on 01/13 at 03:10 PMOur brains sometimes tell us to do sth unnecessary if we go after nature. Don’t care too much. I am sure many people understand that and know what it wants to emphasize!
Posted by Translation and Localization on 01/14 at 06:58 PM>> in the future, we may begin to see “is” labeled as a dialectical relative pronoun, much like the “what” found, for example, in archaic rural outposts of the UK <<
Even though I say it as perhaps shouldn’t, the man as pointed out your post to me thinks the “archaic rural” relative pronoun as you’re talking about here is not so much “what” as “as”...
Posted by Kevin on 01/15 at 02:30 AMHi!!
This post reminds me of the difficulty we usually have when interpreting typos in the original text to translate.
We deal with this issue and many more, as interesting as this one here:
http://blog-de-traduccion.trustedtranslations.com/
Kind regards,
Amelia
Posted by Amelia on 02/23 at 12:00 PM
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