I saw you'd aimed to ping by inserting {{@}} into a previous post.[1] As Help:Fixing failed pings describes at amazing length, that still doesn't work, alas. Which you probably knew already but may have slipped your mind while focused on other things. NebY (talk) 11:46, 10 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, please don't unnecessarily change "which" for "that" in restricted clauses, which and that are both correct in restricted clauses. See Miriam and Webster's dictionary. "Which" is very widely used in restricted clauses by native English speakers, especially in the United Kingdom. Boynamedsue (talk) 17:01, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just to illustrate this, here are the google scholar results for "a language which", it gives hundreds of results in papers written by linguists using this phrase in restricted clauses.Boynamedsue (talk) 17:04, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am also a native speaker of British English (and have been a professional copy-editor for much of my career, for what it's worth). I disagree that my change was "unnecessary". Your (US) source might claim that which and that can be used interchangeably for defining clauses, but there are plenty of sources that disagree (e.g. Grammarly), and I would argue that most careful writers would use that in this case, where the clause was clearly defining. As for your "widely used" and your Google search, I don't accept that a careless usage being common renders it any less ugly. Maybe I'm being a bit prescriptive here, but I will continue to make stylistic grammatical changes as I see fit. I do, however, apologise for reverting the wrong change initially and not noticing that you'd changed it yourself. Dave.Dunford (talk) 17:17, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, as Miriam and Webster say "It has been pointed out that if most of your language’s writers do not follow a rule (and the best writers seem to disregard it as well) then you may have to accept that it’s not much of a rule." Grammarly is not a reliable source, certainly not compared to Miriam and Webster. British grammar textbooks specifically state that "which" is accepted formal usage. The following is from the Cambridge Grammar of English:
Which is used non-personally (to refer to animals and things) it is not used personally:
Why don't you just go to a city which is by the sea? What about Barcelona?
That is more informal than Who or Which and refers to animals, people or things.
The fact that some writers of style guides have misguided ideas about English usage does not oblige us to jump off the cliff with them. Anyway, I let the edit stand because it avoided a repetition of "which" in the sentence, and so it was an improvement, but you should probably avoid trying to edit-war your stylistic preferences into the text when they are not supported by English usage.Boynamedsue (talk) 17:38, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the lecture. It's not my stylistic preferences, it's a commonly held stylistic preference, and even if the rule is "either is OK, but some authorities prefer one", I don't think it's unreasonable to go with the less contentious option. Thus that is the better option in the case in point for two reasons: (1) it doesn't offend purists like me, and (2) less importantly, it avoids the matter of repetition that you note. However, I think we've spent enough time debating the wording of a sentence over which we ultimately agree. Over and out. Dave.Dunford (talk) 18:06, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
