Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 14:35:14 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712111935.OAA28379@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Robin Turner Sender: Lojban list From: Robin Turner Subject: Re: whether X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1880 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Dec 11 14:35:17 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU >> I have never heard "whether" used like >> this, though I suppose it might be common in the U.S. Us Brits would just >> say "She knew he was hungry." > >This is why I only work on English: I can judge when other >people's reports are accurate. If someone made claims like yours >about a language I don't know well, I'd be at their mercy, and >would end up drawing conclusions from false premises. > >Anyway, what can I say? Your report is false to an extent >so blatant that I can scarcely believe you mean it, and am >hard pressed to think of a way to end your delusion. > .u'u .u'u This is what happens when you (a) introduce what you really wanted to talk about with a flippant comment and (b) rely too much on "native speaker intuition". What often happens is that you have a particular extra-linguistic context in mind, search your "intuition bank" for appropriate sentences, and forget the other contexts. >p.s. It occurs to me that you might speak a nonstandard dialect >where "whether" is much less common than "if". Do you find >"She knew if he was hungry" any better? Where did you grow up? > Depends on context again. I would guess that in most contexts, in most dialects, "if" is more common than "whether", and "when" is more common than either of them, but then I'm not a dialectician. Incidentally, I'm from Darkest Shropshire, but my normal speech community is pretty international. Maybe I've been corrupted by Turkish English ;-) >As for "whether" Qs in British >English, you could consult, say, Quirk et al's Comprehensive >Grammar of the English Language. > I wasn't talking about questions but declaratives, and I'm not sure the same rules apply. >BTW, if you are British, where did you acquire your cognitivist >proclivities? > .ue ki'a Robin Turner Bilkent Universitesi, IDMYO, Ankara, Turkey.