Are there words for relative pronouns, for example:
The man, who was walking to the shop, was tall.
Is there a Chinese word for the bolded "who"?
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thank you. I am copy editing a text written by a native speaker of Chinese in English and noticing how awkward the constructions are that require relational terms. Normally seems to be resolved by repetition of the subject in separate sentences. I have no prior knowledge of Chinese grammar but began to wonder!– Eleanor HJun 15, 2019 at 0:46
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2 Answers
In English, when you say "something/someone, who/which has some characters, is abc/is doing xyz.", after translated to Chinese, usually it will be "some characters的something/someone is abc/is doing xyzor separate to two sentence, "something/someone has some character, (optional: 而且/and) is abc/is doing xyz."
In your sample, in addition to @user3919509's answer, you can also say "那个正往店铺走的男子很高". Since "The man" could be anyone, in this case you want to add "該名/那个". In another case, if everybody knows the man, say, we have his name, it will be little different. For example, "Tom, who is working in a big company, has two kids", you can say "汤姆在一个大公司工作，有两个小孩。“
Hope this helps.
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So basically Chinese doesn't have them in the sense that English does?– theK_SAug 13, 2014 at 17:14
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@kevin similar grammatical structure exists in Japanese as well. Aug 14, 2014 at 12:37
The sentence can be interpret as:
該名步行到店鋪的男子，身材高大
Where 該名 will be 'who' in the sentence
