Talk:Who (pronoun)

message: I added a "move to wiktionary" link to this article, becuase much of it needs to be moved.
I do not know if this article should stay in Wikipedia - it probably should since it includes more than a dictionary would.
The reason I added this tag is not because this shouldn't be in Wikipedia, but rather because Wiktionary has definitions for "Who" and "Whom", but there should be an third entry in Wiktionary stating how to decide which one to use.
(Maybe this already exists, but I couldn't find it.)
See the Wiktionary "Whom" talk page
--VegKilla 21:34, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You have accidentally added it to the talk page instead of the article, though, which resulted in this talk page being transwikied to wiktionary.  Hopefully Wiktionary will enjoy the receipt of this talk page, providing them with many hours of reading enjoyment.  --Xyzzyplugh 14:22, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move to Wiktionary 

message: Not being a language specialist I find the example quite difficult. It isn't helped by the author who felt obliged to use he or she and him or her. Surely this is not necessary; he and him would suffice. Any chance of a less technical example? Arcturus 19:12, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The example 

message: I'd be interested in a reference for the claim that it's especially in American English that whom is "dying", in fact, a reference for the implied claim that it used to be common in educated speech in Modern English (any dialect). Neither of these claims agrees with what I've heard (though I don't have a reference handy either). -- MikeG (talk) 02:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, I see some of this was addressed in previous discussion.  But still not reflected in the article. -- MikeG (talk) 04:18, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dialects 

message: This sentence looks dodgy to me: "We have been discussing plans with them, of whom we have grown rather fond these days." Comments? Njál 00:14, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's correct usage, but a terrible sentence. Atchius 05:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  One of the example sentences (which I've replaced with a simpler example) 

message: The Clash's song "Should I Stay or Should I Go" seems to contain the line, "exactly whom I'm supposed to be." (Lyrics sites often render it as "who'm I'm supposed to be," but that makes even less sense.) I believe this is incorrect, since the verb "to be" should be followed by the subject. Of course, people say "It's me" all the time, but the defense of informality doesn't work if you're using an already formal word like whom. It's strange to hear the word in a punk song of all places, even if it's used incorrectly. marbeh raglaim 18:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Phish uses it (correctly) in Story of the Ghost. 69.253.193.234 06:52, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Whom in pop culture 

message: Does this trivial point about speculative fiction really belong at the very top of this basic grammar article?  kraemer 02:04, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-human sentients? 

message: I just was looking at the " who" article and I was a bit taken aback by the "whose" example:
* He is someone whose help ended my despair. ("whose" is adjunct to help, the side clause's subject)
Though this is correct, I find the example a bit contrived.  Given how easily whose and who's are confused in English, I think a more strait forward example would be better.  For example, when I first read the sentence, I assumed there was a tense error with a who's confusion, when there really isn't (i.e. He is someone who has helped to end my despair, which is not what the sentence says).  He is someone whose help I appreciate, feels like a more straight forward example to me, but this may just be my idiosyncrasy.  Thoughts? --Cody.Pope 13:58, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. Your example is more "straight forward" ... but the original example is nonetheless correct.  (Joseph A. Spadaro 22:22, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I also prefer your example, but are whose and who's so easily confused? I can't, off-hand, think of a sentence in which the correct spelling and meaning aren't clear. Xn4 01:57, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The original sounds contrived also to me. The example, by the way, has been cloned in the article on Hypercorrection. On confusing whose and who's: just like the pairs of homophones their – there, your – you're, and its – it's, they get confused all the time. If you Google "someone whose a", "someone whose the", or  "someone whose not", you'll find plenty of confused uses.  --Lambiam 03:19, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Both sentences sound a bit contrived to me: the more natural constructions would be "His help ended my despair" and "I appreciate his help."  How about something like "I apologized to the man whose hat I sat on?"  --Reuben 01:41, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

text: I "cloned" this discussion on the  "who" talk page.  Thanks for the input! --Cody.Pope 13:07, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

text: What is your order number 2001:5B0:2863:CC98:A0F1:B623:FE42:5DA (talk) 01:44, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  From the Reference Desk: on Whose 

message: The article states that "who" is used to refer to humans, and later claims that "what" and "which" are used for "non-sentient beings".
This is absolutely ridiculous, of course, since this is how WP defines sentience:
"Sentience refers to possession of sensory organs, the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness."
It's pseudoscientific nonsense, and should be removed as soon as possible - animals clearly are sentient, and we still use "what" and "which" to refer to them - at least most of them.
Thoughtknot (talk) 09:21, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "Sentience" is synonymously used to describe higher-reasoning - not just self-awareness. This is the case as used in the article. English often treats animals as non-persons, or objects. e.g., "The cat that chased the ball," implies the cat is an object, as opposed to, "The cat who chased the ball." The cat is not addressed as "who," because the cat is generally not perceived at a person. (or sentient) Of course the cat is aware of its own existence, but that's not what I'm understanding "sentience" as in this context. I think this is all the article is trying to indicate. 70.153.124.103 (talk) 18:14, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There are many dialects that use relative "that" with human antecedents. "No maid I've seen like the fair colleen that I met in the County Down." (The Star of the County Down) Or "She's the one that steals the show. (I'll Tell Me Ma) or "The boys that wore the green." (The Irish Volunteer (album)) 109.42.177.44 (talk) 02:00, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Humans are the only sentient beings?

message: From where doth the quote from Einstein come?  I doubt that Einstein would refer to “Gods”.  It would be more likely that he would refer to “gods”, and reserve the upper case for “God”.  My Flatley (talk) 15:42, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I have added a reference for the quote, and edited to show better how it works with the two finite verbs in the sentence. NoeticaTea? 23:17, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Einstein Quote 

message: The article reads like a style manual. The majority of the article is focused on how to use who/m, with little focus on the historical development. Look at that tiny section on its history, it doesn't even tell us what the Old English and Middle English forms were! The tone of the article has a very prescriptivist attitude, reading more like a random book on grammar than an encyclopedic article. This is unacceptable; all linguistic articles on Wikipedia are descriptivist, sensibly so. cntrational (talk) 09:50, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. That is a risk with articles involving common grammatical foibles and hobbyhorses. See also Apostrophe, which needs to be guarded against amateurism of the less benign sort. So please: do more than your one edit so far, to improve the article. NoeticaTea? 23:22, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Style manual, or wiki article? 

message: I feel this article's section on "Demise of whom" is unsupported opinion, rather than documented fact.
Many of the sources used to support its expressed opinion (that "whom" is an archaic form) are writings by non-native speakers of English who study the language from the viewpoint of an outsider. Of the few citations, in support of whom's demise, that refer to works by native speakers of the language, I see only one (Lasnik) written by a professional linguist.
Other citations of native speakers generally tend to support the use of whom, excepting only Simeon Potter, about whom little can be found, and whose book (cited in this article) was published more than 30 years ago.
If whom is truly vanishing, surely we can find a few sources more widely known among scholars who live and work in English-speaking cultures, whose works are more generally accepted. Perhaps we can find sources published by authors for whom English  is not a foreign language. I don't see a convincing weight of citations to support the argument that "whom" has fallen into disuse in English writing.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mooncaine (talk • contribs) 17:44, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Huddleston and Pullum's (2002) "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" deals with this point rather comprehensively, and before that, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's (1985) "Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language" said much the same. Both sources confirm that usage of whom is becoming increasingly restricted, is almost exclusively limited to formal writing, and is not even grammatical in some object positions such as in phrases like "*Whom do you love?"  Whether whom will disappear entirely or not is a different question, and those linguists (as well as most to my estimation) steer clear of making wild predictions like that.  Certainly it will be preserved for some time to come in collocations like "to whom it may concern" and so on, but that's quite different still.  Now, I said this above, but to address your point directly, even without academic citations anyone can verify the notion that usage of whom is in fact on the decline for free using resources like the Corpus of Contemporary American English (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/), Google NGrams, or a similar corpus.  Using a corpus of academic English like MICASE you can see that it is incredibly rare (and, for some reason, more common in philosophy lectures than in any other subject, although that's probably just a sampling problem).  So no, the problem is not that non-native speakers are trying to destroy the language from without; there is ample evidence available to anyone who wants it that "whom" is, essentially, vestigial. To address your point about the supposed imbalance of sources, there are indeed many citations of style guides written by native speakers that regurgitate outdated (and often factually inaccurate) assumptions about the usage "whom," but linguists have been pretty much in agreement on this matter since at least the origin of Chomskian grammar.  If I have time later, I'll insert citations into this article from the grammar books above or other academic sources, but until then, I encourage you to use the ones available to you for free online. Amieni (talk) 21:47, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reliance on inappropriate sources 

message: These two sections are really a bit of a mess; they read as though two people had fought over the keyboard, and each got to insert a couple of sentences before the keyboard was snatched away from them again by their opponent. Besdies, they both seem to be about the "demise of whom". Any objection to collapsing them to one section, and streamlining or organising the content? --JN466 10:18, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No ; and it is false, that Whom do you think you are be a hypercorrection. -- 121.72.186.199 (talk) 20:27, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sections "Historic grammatical development of who and whom" and "Demise of whom?" 

message: In the subsection "Indirect object with or without to" it is written, "How to use whom has been confused by the erroneous and colloquial use of who. When the preposition is dropped or does not immediately precede the pronoun, who is common."
The rest of the article is careful to avoid making prescriptivist judgments about common usage, so it seems out of place to call the replacement of whom with who "erroneous." This wording strongly suggests that colloquial usage is inferior to standard formal English. I suggest replacing "erroneous" with "inconsistent" or, better yet, deleting the first sentence and leaving the second.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.121.124.6 (talk) 06:35, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "erroneous" use of who? 

message: If you were me, you'd know that "whom do you think you are" is grammatically correct (but obsolete). But you're not me, and you don't think you're me, so you're not aware of that. 
It wasn't me that wrote the article. But if it had been me, I would have said that "whom do you think you are" is correct (but obsolete). Whoever added the part of the article that said that "whom do you think you are" was wrong, should retract that statement. That's what I'd do, if I was him.
In case you didn't notice, I used the same grammar rule in all but one of the sentences above, that shows why "whom" is acceptable in this case. Carl Kenner (talk) 14:48, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: If I were him. ;) I think it's a subject complement, so should take the subjective (similar to "It is I."). The use of subjective pronouns in subject complements is a controversial bit of grammar, though, so I wouldn't call "whom" in that sentence "hypercorrect" but it is perhaps a little inconsistent in applying one pedantic and rarely used grammar rule but not applying another. --Tango (talk) 20:40, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: "Whom" is wrong here, compare: "We don't know who you are", not "whom you are". -- megA (talk) 21:51, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Whom do you think you are

message: Two little questions which are not just for my information, but should be clarified in the text as well. (I think the article has much information, but it seems to have been edited by various people and might need some reorganisation.)
I'm not a native English-speaker. In school I was taught that using "who" instead of "whom" was acceptable except after a preposition. For example, if someone said: I'm having dinner at the XYZ restaurant tonight, one would have to ask: With whom? -- Now this article says that "whom" is avoided in any context, but there are also some hints that it's less avoided after prepositions. How's the situation in this regard?
Secondly: It's evident that "whom" is not much used in normal speech, but how is the situation in the written language? Will one find "who" as an object in a reputable newspaper such as The Times or Daily Telegraph? Because I thought "whom" was still used consistently in "good" writing.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.83.215.16 (talk) 23:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: ''Who'' after prepositions and ''who'' in writing

message: Should we explain that, in the many dialects in which "whom" is dated and considered unnatural or overly formal, it can be used for humorous effect for exactly that reason?  Personally, I only ever use "whom" to talk about the word itself or in fixed phrases; by far most of my speech community also does this.
We could potentially cite the internet meme "whomst" and "whomst'd've" as examples. --Daviddwd (talk) 20:20, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using "whom" in a humorous context? 

message: "Who also forms in relative clause, for a specify information about a person or animal, if replaced by he or she" — any idea what the writer was trying to say? That "who" is used to introduce a relative clause that adds information, etc.? Pluvianus (talk) 00:47, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usage Note is gibberish 

message: What is your order number 2001:5B0:2863:CC98:A0F1:B623:FE42:5DA (talk) 01:45, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is your order number