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A plate of gourd fritters with lettuce on the side, with a bowl of tamarind sauce to be taken with a cup of plain green tea is hard to resist.

The sentence is from an English Textbook in an Asean country. Is it grammatically correct and acceptable? If not, please correct it.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

anonymousThe sentence is from an English Textbook in an Asean country. Is it grammatically correct and acceptable? If not, please correct it.

Asian

Native speaker stink at this kind of question. We never think the same way as the test maker did. I would fail an ESL test, I am sure.

I am not familiar with the cuisine in play here, but it sounds delicious. I don't know what I am supposed to do with the tamarind sauce, and plain lettuce is a puzzling side dish where I come from. You can keep the squash fritters coming, though (in my dialect, a gourd is the dried object). What I mean is that I don't know what item goes with what.

That said, the comma seems wrong because it seems to mean that the bowl of sauce is to be taken with a cup of tea. If the comma is removed you get "A plate of squash fritters with lettuce on the side with a bowl of tamarind sauce to be taken with a cup of plain green tea is hard to resist."

Having two "with"s like that is not ideal, but it is not too bad. The main problem is that the subject of the sentence is way too long. By the time the reader gets to "is", he's given up hope of ever seeing a verb. Assuming you eat the lettuce with the fritters, one fix for that is "A meal of a plate of squash fritters, lettuce on the side, with a bowl of tamarind sauce to be taken with a cup of plain green tea is hard to resist." The subject is "meal" now, but it is still a long wait. And that pesky comma is back.

Get everything out of the way at the start, and set off the tea at the end. "A meal that is hard to resist is a plate of squash fritters, lettuce on the side, with a bowl of tamarind sauce, to be taken with a cup of plain green tea."

But "to be taken" is not parallel in the list, and we normally describe food in a list. That makes it "A meal that is hard to resist is a plate of squash fritters, lettuce on the side, with a bowl of tamarind sauce and a cup of plain green tea."

Let's eat!

AlpheccaStars · Answer

anonymousgourd fritters

This is Indian English. Bottle gourd is also called white-flowered gourd or calabash gourd. Snake gourd is also used for fritters.

There is a missing comma, which makes the sentence ungrammatical. Always have an even number of commas between subject and verb.

"Taken" is also characteristic of Indian English.

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