English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm a foreign student who is interested in the book known as Alice in the wonderland. There was a conversation between Alice and the red queen in which the latter replied:
"...but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!..."
I've never seen the sentence with 'which' followed by 'that'. Could anyone explain the meaning of this sentence and the grammar of 'which that' as well?
The "which" refers to the other nonsense she has heard. We could restructure the sentence as
That would be as sensible as a dictionary compared with other nonsense which I've heard!
but then it would not be parallel with her comment about the garden and the hill.
You have a demonstrative pronoun "that" (meaning "the thing I just said") in a clause
That would be as sensible as a dictionary.
And we are fitting this into a "compared with" sentence:
That would be as sensible as a dictionary compared with the nonsense which I've heard.
Except the Red Queen doesn't structure it like this. She starts with "I've heard nonsense," and now "which" is a pronoun that refers to this nonsense. Then the "that" clause is inverted to the final position.
Here is an example with simpler words:
That strawberry is sweet compared with the apple I ate
I ate an apple, compared with which, that strawberry is sweet.
(A comma might help between which and that)
The style here is "heightened" it is the style of speech that Oxford professors of the the 18th century might use. It sounds rather pretentious now.
