Grammatica - loco

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De man in wiens stoel ik zit is mijn oom.
But wier, as in De vrouw in wier stoel ik zit, is mijn tante is very
rare indeed, other than in the most formal of contexts.
In speech the following would be used:
De man in wie z’n stoel ik zit . . .
De vrouw in wie d’r stoel ik zit . . .
De mensen in wie hun stoel wij zitten . . .
In writing, if one wants to avoid wiens and wier, the following
might be preferable, but it sounds as contorted in Dutch as its literal
translation does in English, i.e. ‘in the chair of whom’ and is
therefore not an ideal solution:
De man/vrouw/mensen in de stoel van wie ik zit
(b) A preposition + whose, when the antecedent is a thing, i.e. not a
person, also causes complications if one wishes to avoid using welks
(or the even rarer welker which was once used for non-personal
feminine and plural antecedents). Once again, as with wiens, welks
is sometimes found in the formal written language when preceded
by a preposition:
Het huis op welks dak de kat de hele nacht had gezeten, is de
volgende dag als gevolg van de storm ingestort.
The house whose roof the cat had sat on all night, collapsed the next
day as a result of the storm.
Alternatively this could be expressed by Het huis op het dak
waarvan (compare ‘the house on the roof of which’), but both
alternatives sound very contorted and would certainly never be
encountered in the spoken language and would even be avoided
in the written language wherever possible (compare what was
said about the last example in (a) above). Dutch simply seeks to
rephrase the statement and thus avoid the complication. In the
case of the above example something like the following would be
more usual:
Het huis waar de kat de hele nacht op het dak gezeten had, is
de volgende dag als gevolg van de storm ingestort.
The house where the cat spent the whole night on the roof collapsed
the next day as a result of the storm.
Relative
pronouns
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