Inanimate whose

Attested usage is common in Early Modern English, with inanimate whose appearing repeatedly in the works of Shakespeare, in the King James Bible, and in the writings of Milton and others.

[9] In some dialects, thats has developed as a colloquial genitive relative pronoun for non-personal antecedents, as in:[10] The earliest known objections to the inanimate whose date from the late 18th century.

In 1764, the English grammarian Robert Lowth disapproved of the inanimate whose except in "the higher Poetry, which loves to consider everything as bearing a personal character".

[16] The American grammarian Lindley Murray wrote of the inanimate whose in his English Grammar of 1795, but his position on it is uncertain; he reprinted Priestly's opinion but also stated: "By the use of this license, one word is substituted for three".

[18] The American philologist George Perkins Marsh stated in his Lectures on the English Language of 1860: "At present, the use of whose, the possessive of who, is pretty generally confined to persons, or things personified, and we should scruple to say, 'I passed a house whose windows were open.'

[23] John Lesslie Hall published his research on the subject in his English Usage of 1917; he discovered over 1000 passages by about 140 authors from the 15th to the 20th centuries that used the inanimate whose,[24] including use by those who had objected to it or declared its use rare.

[4][29] In his Plain Words of 1954, Ernest Gowers calls the "grammarians' rule" that whose "must not be used of inanimate objects ... a cramping one, productive of ugly sentences and a temptation to misplaced commas".

[31] Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage states that, amongst "the current books" that discussed the subject as of the late 20th century, "not one of them finds [inanimate] whose anything but standard".

To the assertions of early grammarians, that dictionary counters that "[i]ts common occurrence in poetry undoubtedly owes more to its graceful quality than to any supposed love of personification among poets" and that its usage "is perhaps more likely to occur in the works of good writers than bad ones".

[34] The 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (2010) states that the construction is "widely accepted as preventing unnecessary awkwardness" and "lends greater smoothness" to prose than of which.