Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[fw]

Hello everyone.

The sentences below are translations that I made from the same single, isolated sentence in Japanese.
1. Their friendship, which grew through their letters, continued all their life.

My question: (1) Is #1 grammatically correct English? I�m afraid it might be a little awkward, so I have rewritten it into the following two sentences.
2 Their friendship, which had grown through their letters, continued all their life.
3 Their friendship grew through their letters, and continued all their life.

(2) If #1 is grammatically correct and natural English, which is it more similar in meaning to #2 or #3?

Best regards,
fw

[Kristea]

FW -

Sentence #1 is not correct. It should read as follows. "Their friendship, which grew through their letters, continued all their lives."

#2 sounds better to me. However, it would be as follows. "Their friendship, which had grown through their letters, continued all their lives."

#3 would be OK with the following corrections. "Their friendship grew through their letters and continued all their lives." (No comma) I won't be surprised if others tell you this would be more common; but for me, the subject (friendship) is far enough away from the second predicate (continued) that loss of meaning might occure.

My money is on version #2 for clearity of meaning.

Hope this helps - Kristi
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