79 1. Relative Clauses

“He’s not that far ahead of you,” Latinitas said. “Right now he’s copying out memorable sayings from the mimes of Publilius Syrus, just like you did a few days ago. I’ll show you what he’s been writing when he’s done. But first you have to learn about something called Relative Clauses.”

“A Clause has a subject and a verb; in sentences with more than one clause, they are often connected by some sort of conjunction:

The boy studies Latin, and the stranger eats a sandwich.

The two clauses – (1) The boy studies Latin, (2) the stranger eats a sandwich – could each stand as their own sentence. So, we would say there are two Independent or Main Clauses here.

Other times, one clause is ‘subordinated to’ or made ‘dependent on’ the other by using a subordinating conjunction, like ‘while’, ‘if’, ‘when’, etc.:

The boy studies Latin while the stranger eats a sandwich.

Now, the second clause (while the stranger eats a sandwich) is the Subordinate or Dependent Clause – meaning it could not stand alone as a complete sentence – and the first clause (The boy studies Latin) is the Main Clause.

“A Relative Clause is a Subordinate Clause that starts with a Relative Pronoun. In English, ‘who’, ‘whose’, and ‘which’ are common relative pronouns. Take this sentence:”

‘A plan which no one can change is a bad one.’

“‘which no one can change’ is the Relative Clause (it is a Subordinate Clause); the rest – ‘A plan… is a bad one’ is the Main Clause. Here is a sentence that contains a main clause and five relative clauses:”

The boy on the road who was leading us, whom you were noticing, about whom you were thinking, to whom you were yielding, whose name you do not know, is Seneca.

“Here the main clause is just ‘The boy on the road… is Seneca’.”

“The Relative Pronoun refers to (and takes the place of) a noun or pronoun that is usually expressed in the Main Clause. In English, the relative usually comes after the noun or pronoun that it refers to, and it often does so in Latin as well:

a plan (noun) which no one can change the boy (noun) who was leading us

“The noun or pronoun that a relative pronoun refers to – the plan, or the boy – is called its