Ronen Sen, India’s Ambassador to the United States was much in the news a short while ago. He put his foot in the mouth raising a storm of protest across the country. My interest in what the Ambassador said is strictly scholarly, nothing political. My interest is in the underlined phrase in what he said (as reported in the papers). ‘All what we are doing is absolutely unprecedented.’ —DH, 22, 2007, p.14.
All what? How does it sound?
Not worse than the rest of the speech, you may say. But all what is, I’m afraid, ungrammatical.
If you look at the sentence again, you will see that there are two clauses there. The main clause is: All is absolutely unprecedented. The subordinate clause (a relative clause) is: what we are doing.
What is to be taken as the ‘condensed’ form of that which. We can now see that Mr Sen’s sentence is equivalent to: All that which we are doing is absolutely unprecedented. As you can see all that is the antecedent of the relative clause which we are doing.
The replacement of that which by what is quite common. What is troubling me =that which is troubling me/ What is required=that which is required.
But what can replace only all that which, not just that which. This follows from a general constraint on rules that they apply to whole phrases and not parts of phrases. In the phrase all that, that is the ‘head;’ all is its modifier’; cf. all this, all those.
If the rule converting that which into what cannot apply here, then it should remain as it is. That is, the sentence should read All that which we are doing is absolutely unprecedented. If this sounds a bit stilted, try: What we are doing is absolutely unprecedented. And if you want to retain the force of all, how about: All that we are doing is absolutely unprecedented.
Thirty minutes or less
Here we have a phrase containing a number (thirty) followed by a word which indicates quantity. Should it not be thirty minutes or fewer?
Safire who discusses this question (Let a smile be your umbrella, Crown publications, NY, 2001, p.301) defends the phrase but adds: ‘I would stick with 29 minutes or fewer.’
The point is that thirty minutes is not viewed as so many minutes but expressing an amount of time —‘half an hour’. So in this case ‘or less’ is justified. Not so with 29 minutes (as he feels).
To this James Macaulay rightly points out that the number of minutes is irrelevant. ‘He can run a mile in 4 minutes or fewer’ would sound absolutely bizarre’
The point is well-taken. The fact is that in these contexts we do not really think of minutes as numbers but as quantities. In the case of thirty minutes there is a phrase to express the amount: ‘half an hour’; with sixty minutes we have ‘one hour’. It just happens that such quantitative phrases are not found with ten, twenty, twenty nine… minutes. But in certain contexts, e.g. racing, we think of them as quantities. Hence less, a word expressing ‘amount’ is justified.
William Follett puts it quite convincingly. ‘We take a million dollars as a sum of money, not as a number; fifty feet as a measure of distance, not as one foot added to forty nine feet. thirty minutes as a stretch of time , exactly like half an hour. With these expressions a singular verb is appropriate. (A million dollar is more easily accumulated than it used to be/ fifty feet is too short a distance) and the quantitative less is therefore correct in comparisons; fewer would be absurd.’— Modern American Usage.
Michael Swan (Practical English Usage, 1997) gives the traditional rule about few / less in this way. ‘Less is the comparative of little (used especially before uncountable nouns). Fewer is the comparative of few (used before plural nouns)’. This is not in dispute. What is in dispute is how certain expressions involving numbers are viewed in certain contexts. As shown above these are contexts (29 minutes or less) where a numerical expression is viewed as indicating an amount/quantity. Cf. Any one less than 6’2 will not be allowed to play in this team (basketball).
The writer can be contacted at ksyadurajan@yahoo.com
