the son of whom / dont le fils

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Permalink Reply by Erwan on January 22, 2012 at 9:21am

Your first sentence is right. There's a small spelling mistake :"professor"

In your two late French sentences :
 - de qui is only used in a question e.g : De qui parle-t-on ?

 - you can't write dont without being followed by a subject.

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Permalink Reply by joll on January 22, 2012 at 1:22pm

Thank you very much.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 22, 2012 at 5:34pm

Just to expand slightly on what Erwan was saying: in what I'll call the 'simple' case such as this, dont is pretty much always used rather than de qui.

In addition to the interrogative case that Erwan mentions, the other main case when you will get de qui rather than dont is when a preposition is involved-- so effectively when you're saying the euivalent of "about whose...", "on whose...", "with whose..." (which in everyday English is more naturally expressed with the preposition at the end of the sentence: "whose ... about", "whose ... on", "whose ... with" ) etc. In these cases, French is closer to the "formal" version of the English. So for example:

Everyday English: The man whose daughter he used to work with.

Formal English:     The man with whose daughter he used to work.

French:                      L'homme avec la fille de qui il travaillait.

In cases like this, dont effectively has "nowhere to go". You can also use duquel/de la quelle etc in such cases instead of de qui.

You'll find the odd corner case where de qui is used rather than dont in the 'simple' case because dont doesn't usually indicate the notion of "direction". So if there's a genuine notion of "from who" with a notion of 'transfer', you may get examples such as the folllowing where I think Erwan would probably agree it would be odd to use "dont":

Mon père est la personne de qui je tiens.

Mon père est la personne dont je tiens.

"My father is the person I take after"

You don't need to worry much about this last point-- it's really a fairly rare exception, I think. But I just mention it to highlight that even if you come across the occasional counterexample, not to let this detract from the general rule.

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Permalink Reply by Erwan on January 22, 2012 at 8:07pm

You're right Neil. These cases appears in French. It's really astonishing to see someone whose mother tongue is not French better know my own language.

By the way, as you notice these structures are seldom used. We often transform the phrase to use "dont" or other pronoun.

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Permalink Reply by joll on January 23, 2012 at 10:09am

Thank you very much, Neil Coffey and Erwan.

It is quite interesting and helpful ; I do appreciate your kindness.

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