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According to google ngrams the second variant is more widely used:
[It was cold there], what took us by surprise.
[It was cold there], which took us by surprise.
Can anybody, please, explain me why? Which variant is better? Will it be a mistake to use the first one?
- It was cold there, what took us by surprise.
- It was cold there, which took us by surprise.
In both examples, the words in bold refer to It was cold there – a clause.
As a relative pronoun, what, unlike which, cannot be used to refer to a previous clause. Therefore, only sentence 2 is grammatical.
