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I want to say "Fixing some things that [x] not included in the last commit"

This is a comment I want to say about a piece of code I wrote (software development) but i'm not sure if [x] should be "was" or "were".

I know that:

  • I was
  • You were
  • He was
  • She was
  • It was
  • We were
  • They were

But what if I need to say something in past tense about "that things" like in this sentence?

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  • I'm getting confused because i'm not used to hear or read about this. In spanish it is quite simple because we use the same word for that and I used to mechanically conjugate the verb.
    – Mauro Aguilar
    Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 16:37
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    You conjugate the same way you would for the corresponding third person pronoun. "Some things" = "they" so "were".
    – sumelic
    Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 16:44

1 Answer 1

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"That [were/was] not included in the last commit" is a relative clause in this sentence, the subject of which is the relative pronoun "that." The verb of a relative clause must always agree with the subject, and if the subject is the relative pronoun, with the pronoun's antecedent, "things" in this case. Therefore, since "things were not included" is the correct subject-verb pairing, you should use the word "were" in this sentence.

In answer to your last question, "that" is a relative pronoun (in this case), not a demonstrative one, so you can't derive "that things" from the original sentence.

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