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That was about the only title I could think of that accurately describes the problem.

The situation is whenever you go somewhere and there are people/things there that you don't know. Instead of saying something like "I went there and there were people that I didn't know" or "I didn't know anybody who was there", some people try to combine the sentences "There were people there that I didn't know" and "I didn't even know who they were" for emphasis. The only thing wrong with that is that we run into a problem:

"There were people there that I didn't even know who they were."

"There were people there that I didn't even know who were."

The first sentence has an unnecessary "they" and the second one removes it but it sounds awkward.

What's the best way to say this?

Joey Miller
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  • If you google "There were people there that I didn't even know who they were" (with quotes) you get absolutely 0 results. So who exactly is trying to combine those sentences? – mfoy_ Jul 20 '15 at 18:53
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    Who is combining the sentences is irrelevant, it's just something that I've heard people do and have probably done myself. What I'm asking is what the best way is to go about combining the two sentences. – Joey Miller Jul 20 '15 at 18:58
  • Both versions are quite commonly heard. To me, the first is very awkward and clumsy, whereas the second sounds perfectly natural and is how I would say it myself. Obviously, going by the way you’ve written this, it’s more or less the opposite for you. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 20 '15 at 19:03
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    Congratulations! You've just rediscovered the Complex Noun Phrase Constraint, one of the Ross Constraints. – John Lawler Jul 20 '15 at 19:15
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    The way the phrases are nested obscures the meaning. After the fifth reading of the OP, this astute reader finally recognized: "I didn't even know some of the people who were there." Of course, @JohnLawler is intimately familiar with the issue and calls it by name :-) – ScotM Jul 20 '15 at 19:22
  • @ScotM: I think it would be stretching a point to say OP's first example "obscures the meaning". Surely any native speaker will understand such usages perfectly well - it's just that at some level we're discomfited by the fact that our standard concepts of "grammar" seem to be getting trampled on. As John comments on Give him a box that everyone knows what it contains in the linked answer, that's not exactly a "terrific" sentence. But so far as I'm aware, English syntax doesn't actually support any better (and reasonably succinct) way of verbalising such a relationship. – FumbleFingers Jul 20 '15 at 19:35
  • possible duplicate of "Give him a box that everyone knows what it contains." – FumbleFingers Jul 20 '15 at 19:37
  • @JohnLawler why don't you post an answer? Both sentences sound almost good enough, but something is amiss/askew. For example, can we really say "I didn't even know who were" as Janus suggests? – Mari-Lou A Jul 21 '15 at 07:58
  • I can agree, @FumbleFingers, that the first example was slightly less obscure than the second. I think it might be easier to untangle the complex syntax in a spoken conversation where the speaker's pitches and pauses indicate how he is gradually painting himself into an untenable syntactic corner. I found no grammatical error other than the convoluted complexity, which is tantamount to a clever shell game designed to hide the true meaning: which antecedent is hiding under that pronoun? – ScotM Jul 21 '15 at 15:06
  • @Janus, Mari-Lou: I'm far from convinced any native speakers would use or defend OP's second version. As John comments here, although it's not actually "grammatical" even with that "resumptive" *they, at least the first version avoids the Ross constraint trainwreck*. – FumbleFingers Jul 21 '15 at 17:23
  • @ScotM: Are you seriously saying you find either or both versions "grammatical"? I'm a bit surprised, but it seems you've just given the lie to the first sentence of my immediately preceding comment. – FumbleFingers Jul 21 '15 at 17:27
  • @FumbleFingers I have heard both versions used by native speakers many times (and have used at least the second one quite a few times myself when I managed to talk myself into a grammatical corner). The first is more common, and I suspect that, despite what John writes on the page he links to, there is idiosyncratic variation between speakers as to which is the worse syntactic sin: violating a Ross constraint (this particular one, at least), or violating the fundamental principles of how relative clauses are formed. To me, the latter is worse than the former. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 21 '15 at 17:47
  • (I will readily admit that my very strong preference for the version without the resumptive pronoun very likely is affected—perhaps effected—by second-language interference. My other native language, Danish, does not treat relative clauses as islands and has no such Ross constraint, and resumptive pronouns are completely nonexistent. Even so, I have heard what I’m reasonably sure were monolingual English speakers use the non-resumptive form in natural speech as well.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 21 '15 at 17:50
  • @Janus: My only other language is French, but I'm not fluent enough to even know whether the French version of this construction "works". Interestingly, ScotM also appears to be something of a polyglot, and doesn't seem too perturbed by it either. Given this rather peculiar "syntactic constraint" wasn't even identified until 1967 (despite being incredibly resistant to being ignored, from my perspective), it well might be that people conversant with alternative syntaxes find it easier to accept our (half-hearted, doomed, imho) attempts to "normalise" it in some way. – FumbleFingers Jul 21 '15 at 20:29
  • ...I'm particularly interested in the fact that at least some "competent" speakers aren't freaked by the syntax, because 9 times out of 10 here on ELU it's me who doesn't have a problem with a usage that many others reject (often it's just a US/UK split, but by no means always). – FumbleFingers Jul 21 '15 at 20:34
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    @Fumble I’d say in French the pronoun is absolutely required. I suspect the way the whole sentence just implodes and collapses in my head if I try to make a non-resumptive version in French must be similar to how it feels to you in English. It’s probably even rarer in French that the situation arises, but I did manage to find at least one exact cognate (look for user AK-13110): « j'étais avec 3 collègue, la cousine d'un et _une fille que je ne sais pas qui c'était_ ». – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 21 '15 at 20:42
  • Although… there does seem to be someone who uses J'aime quelqu'un que je ne sais pas qui est as his/her Facebook profile name… hmmm… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 21 '15 at 20:43
  • Just to be clear, @FumbleFingers, I consider the Ross Constraints legitimate boundaries of acceptable grammar, so I would label both examples substandard grammar--at best. I agree that my experience with the alternative syntactical arrangements of other languages tends to make me more "flexible" in my reading and listening, and to a lesser extent, in my speaking and writing. I consider flexibility one of the charming advantages of English. – ScotM Jul 22 '15 at 12:31
  • @ScotM: I'm a bit hazy as regards exactly what linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts mean by "substandard" and "nonstandard". I'm a mere dilettante, so I'm likely to use those terms interchangeably, but I'm guessing the professionals make some fine distinction. What interests me here is that (I believe) the vast majority of native speakers "know" that neither of OP's suggestions are really "valid", but if forced to pick one or the other, they'll almost all choose the first version as "the lesser of two evils". – FumbleFingers Jul 22 '15 at 12:51
  • I'm relatively certain that I've never heard a native speaker, in the UK where I'm from nor here in the US, use the second form given above. I've definitely heard people stumble into the first one... and confuse themselves. I'm reasonably certain that I couldn't produce the same confusion in Croatian where the pronoun is required (Bili su ljudi tamo koji nisam ni znao tko su oni), nor in Indonesian which doesn't need it at all (Di situ ada orang-orang yang aku bahkan tidak kenal), although I'm having trouble working out where the "even" would end up there. It feels odd. – Chris Subagio Jul 23 '15 at 01:48
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Yoichi Oishi Jul 28 '15 at 02:02
  • @JoeyMiller -Your french example is not correct (the errors are between '#') « j'étais avec 3 collègue#s#, la cousine #d'un# et une fille #que# je ne sais pas qui c'était ». you will rather say "j'étais avec 3 collègues, la cousine de l'un d'entre eux et une fille que je ne connaissais pas". What gives in English "I was with 3 colleagues, the cousin of one of them and a girl I didn't know". – Graffito Aug 27 '15 at 10:55

5 Answers5

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It's often helpful, when sentences are getting messy like this, to replace a complicated phrase-verb with a more straightforward verb. The phrase-verb that's causing the problem is "(to) know who (someone) is" - we can replace it with the simpler verb "(to) identify (someone)". So our sentence becomes: "there were people there whom I couldn't even identify".

Alternately, because your basic goal is to describe the people, you can toss out the verb construction all together and just use an adjective! Replace "who I didn't know who they were" with "who were unidentifiable". Or, for something a little more casual, perhaps "some of the people there were a total mystery to me".

604steph
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There were people there whom I didn’t even know.

tchrist
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Anton
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  • Well, this is certainly the best way to say that, but could you explain why this is so? Or why the OP's examples sound awkward? I'm not saying I can, I believe this is a hard question to answer fully. – Mari-Lou A Jul 21 '15 at 10:07
  • Sentences that violate a Ross constraint are very ungrammatical. Why the Ross constraints exist, and why they have this force, is about like why neutrons exist; very very hard to explain, and you need extra training to understand the explanation. But that's the reason, like it or not. And I'll try anyway. Put very simply, when a word shows up in an unexpected place (like who in a Who is he?) the listener has to figure out somehow where it came from in order to parse the question. But as you get farther away, it's harder to do, and island boundaries are limits on this process. – John Lawler Jul 21 '15 at 13:38
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    I am confused. I thought the meaning of your first sentence was "I didn't even recognize some of the people there." That is, not only did you not know them, you had no idea who they were. Your second sentence gave me a headache, and I still don't understand it. – ab2 Jul 21 '15 at 17:29
  • What @ab2 said. The "grammatical" revised version here (...whom I didn’t even know) doesn't actually mean the same as OP's original (neither of which is grammatical, but I and most others would sooner put up with OP's first version than the second). There's a clear difference between knowing someone (being personally acquainted with them - friends, etc.), and knowing who they are (celebrities and others you've heard about, but don't actually know, for example). – FumbleFingers Jul 21 '15 at 20:40
  • the OP's original sentences sound wrong because of the who were at the end. It's highly unusual to end a sentence on a verb (were). The first sentence does not have an unnecessary they, it is correct despite being clumsy; the second sentence does not really make sense. Another alternative is to say There were people I didn't know there which gives a bit less emphasis, the original suggests that the person thought they should have known the people. – Mousey Aug 09 '15 at 00:26
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This is just a bad idea for a sentence. Not only as John Lawler points out due to the unfortunate marble gargling of a Ross Constraint, but because the meaning might not come across as you intended.

“There were people there that I didn't even know who were”

You described your desire to express:

  • There were people there.
  • I did not know any of the people there.

What I actually read was:

  • There were people there.
  • Of the people who were there, some I did not know would be there.
  • or: I was not aware of every person who was there.

My reading is that the "that" refers to "the fact that people would be/were there", not to "the people". That is to say I took you to be telling me that you were unaware of their presence at the place, not that you weren't their acquaintance.

So, I'd dump the whole thing. Instead, I'd pick from something like:

  1. There were people there I didn't recognize.
  2. There were people there I was surprised to see.
  3. There were more people there than I had the chance to meet.

You could also choose a more specific or colorful variant that emphasizes what you're really trying to say to your audience. For example:

  1. There were even people there that I'd never met before.
  2. There were so many people there, I have no clue who might have also been in the room!
  3. There were people there I certainly hadn't expected to see at all.
  4. etc.
Chris Subagio
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    I don’t see Joey describing a desire to express “I did not know any of the people there”—rather, though the description is a bit convoluted, it looks to me like he “Some of the people who were there I did not know”. Also, I cannot in any possible way understand the sentence the way you do. In “There were people there that…”, the antecedent of that is quite unambiguously people to me; if it were the whole sentence, you would have to use which instead of that. And “I didn’t even know who (they) were” specifically emphasises that we’re talking identity, not presence. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 21 '15 at 17:37
  • What @Janus said. There's no ambiguity involved, simply the proglem that English grammar doesn't support the kind of "complex sentence" being aimed at. – FumbleFingers Jul 21 '15 at 20:13
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That IS a really bad idea for a sentence...to me, it seems to be missing its ending: There were people there that you didn't even know who were WHAT? It's not a sentence.

I think you want to express that: Even though there are always various people present at these places, there is never anybody amongst them that you know personally. So you could say:

There were people there, but I didn't know any of them. or There were people there, but there wasn't anybody I know. or I saw a bunch of people, but I didn't see anybody I knew.

Wendy
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There were people there that I didn't know.

Steve
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