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I'm confused when it comes to writing the following: "..., I bought from my one of the sweet sweet friends" vs "...., I bought from one of my sweet sweet friends"

Neither me or my partner is native in the English language. Could someone elaborate how I should think when it comes to using pronouns in this sort of context? And also are both the above sentences correct?

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    Not a native speaker but "one of my sweet sweet friends" sounds much better.
    – Stan
    Commented May 15, 2016 at 13:32
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    To avoid making the duplication of "sweet" look like a typographical error, I would recommend writing, "I bought it from one of my sweet, sweet friends." Or, if the first part of the sentence says what you purchased, then you might write, "..., which I bought from one of my sweet, sweet friends." In either case, the extra comma is helpful.
    – Mark Hubbard
    Commented May 15, 2016 at 13:48
  • I think the comma is not just helpful, but required.
    – Rob K
    Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 15:03

3 Answers 3

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In English, words for parts of the body (head, leg, hand) and personal relations (son, parents, sister, boss, colleague) are nearly always qualified by a possessive rather than "the". So "my friends">

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one of my sweet sweet friends OR one of the sweet sweet friends of mine.

one of is to limit only one member of your sweet sweet friends.

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my one of the sweet friends is a partitive construction. You wanted to mean one friend from your many sweet friends. But you have constructed the phrase incorrectly.

one of my sweet friends is correct. Here one is a determinative and it's a Fused Determinative Phrase in that construction.

A genitive case of a pronoun (i.e my) can't be used before a Fused Determinative Phrase.

Therefore my one of the sweet friends is incorrect grammatically.

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  • But "one of the sweet friends" is not idiomatic in any English I know, because (as I said in my answer) most relation words (like "friend") nearly always take possessives. The only context in which I would expect to find "one of the [anything] friends" is in a narrative about a group of friends,which doesn't appear to be what this is about. Is "one of the friends" (to mean "one of my friends") idiomatic in Indian English?
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 0:04
  • @ColinFine nods yes now I see it. It sounds really odd. I will edit my answer.
    – Man_From_India
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 0:34

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