Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 May 10

= May 10 =

What tears you apart?
Is this quote right?

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart." — Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Wouldn't it be "what tears you apart"? --Llaanngg (talk) 17:51, 10 May 2015 (UTC)


 * To my (non-native-speaker) mind, yes, definitely. The grammatical subject of "tear(s)" – and of "warm(s)" in the previous sentence – is the pronoun "what", not the antecedent "they" (or "memories"), so regular subject-verb agreement demands the singular. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:54, 10 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Replying to a different meaning of "right": I don't know where that quoted wording came from (and it can be found all over the internet), but in Philip Gabriel's translation of Kafka on the Shore it's “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” ---Sluzzelin talk  19:09, 10 May 2015 (UTC)


 * What can be plural, for example in this sentence from Matthew Arnold quoted in the OED: "The Revolution made a clean sweep of all old endowments; what exist date from a time since the Revolution." But the version that Sluzzelin found is more concise and, in my opinion, better style. Lesgles (talk) 19:17, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, that option of a plural "what" is interesting, but I'd expect it would only work in a special environment like this elliptical construction, with an implied syntactic head ("what endowments"); this obviously wouldn't work in a reverse pseudo-cleft, where no such implied antecedent is available. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:17, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree, they're not quite the same. There's no implied plural noun in the Kafka quote. I think it's a notional agreement, normal in British English, where a word that isn't itself plural, but stands for a plural notion (in this case "they", standing in turn for "memories"), takes a plural verb. --Nicknack009 (talk) 21:48, 10 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The original (according to the web) is 思い出はあなたの身体を内側から温めてくれます. でもそれと同時にあなたの身体を内側から激しく切り裂いていきます. "Memories [are kind enough to] warm your body from the inside. But at the same time they violently cut your body apart from the inside." So neither translation is very close, but Gabriel's is better. There's nothing in the original to justify the "are what" construct, which implies in English that nothing else does that thing. -- BenRG (talk) 01:08, 11 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm a native Californian speaker and "Memories are what warms you" sounds ungrammatical to me, though I can't say why—there's nothing obviously wrong with your analysis. -- BenRG (talk) 01:08, 11 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The original quote is correct. Memories are, not memories is. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:01, 11 May 2015 (UTC)


 * But the question (which I think has been answered) was about "what are" or "what is", not about "memories are" or "memories is". --174.88.135.200 (talk) 05:21, 11 May 2015 (UTC)


 * 'Memories' is the subject all the way through. All four verbs agree with 'memories', and the sentences work as written. AlexTiefling (talk) 11:00, 11 May 2015 (UTC)