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Which one of these phrases sound more correct and why? What is the rule about asking 2 questions in the same sentence in English?

Could you please tell me when can I get my check from you?

Could you please tell me when I can get my check from you?

Kaique
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  • Are you a student or preparing for an English exam? – Apollyon Aug 10 '19 at 11:14
  • I'm a student of English. – Kaique Aug 10 '19 at 13:35
  • Then you should be careful in reading some of the answers provided here. They may make you lose points on school exams. – Apollyon Aug 10 '19 at 13:36
  • How would you have answered the question? – Kaique Aug 10 '19 at 13:37
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    Only your second example sentence would earn you points on exams. – Apollyon Aug 10 '19 at 13:38
  • Possible duplicate of "Do you know where's Linda?" vs "Do you know where Linda is?" –  Aug 11 '19 at 19:47
  • I don't think the linked question is a duplicate, although it is related. – David Siegel Aug 11 '19 at 20:06
  • @DavidSiegel How so? It's the same thing. Does anyone know ~ Could you tell me, Where is Linda? ~ When can I get the check? –  Aug 11 '19 at 20:32
  • @userr2684291 In the linked question, the issue comes up through a contraction, and deals with what amounts to an embedded question. The first is not so here, and the 2nd less so. And the issue that the OP raised about multiple questions is not addressed at all. – David Siegel Aug 11 '19 at 20:36
  • @DavidSiegel The contraction is irrelevant, and what is this second thing that isn't present here? You misunderstood what the asker asked there by referring to "asking 2 questions in the same sentences": they're talking about Could you please tell me...? as the first question and When can I get my check from you? as the second. This isn't about coordination (I don't know where I'm going, or* what I'm doing.) – they simply don't know the term embedded interrogative, (or embedded question, if they wanted to refer to the question the whole thing actually* expresses). –  Aug 11 '19 at 21:34
  • @userr2684291 1 I didn't misunderstand in the least. As I told the OP this is not two questions. I didn't use the term embedded question, although that is indeed what this is. I provided an example of coordination to show that a sentence which does in fact ask two questions is possible, but very different in form. That whole issue is not present in the linked Q or its answers. – David Siegel Aug 11 '19 at 21:39

3 Answers3

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  • Could you please tell me when can I get my check from you?
  • Could you please tell me when I can get my check from you?

Both are acceptable although the second is far more common and sounds more natural. Neither involves two questions as I see it. "when can I" does use the inversion common in question forms, but that just emphasizes that it is a question; there is no second question here. Both mean "when are you going to pay me?" but in a more polite form. There is no difference in meaning.

There are cases where multiple questions may be asked in the same sentence. For example:

  • Jack wasn't sure where he was going to go, or what he would do when he got there.
  • I'd like to know what you did with my luggage, and where you suggest that I sleep tonight?

In each case the questions could be recast into separate sentences. That is not true of the example asked about here.

David Siegel
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  • The first is actually a big no-no on standardized tests. – Apollyon Aug 10 '19 at 04:33
  • @Apollyon which do you mean by "the first"? and which tests? – David Siegel Aug 10 '19 at 05:05
  • I'm referring to "Could you please tell me when can I get my check from you?" – Apollyon Aug 10 '19 at 05:06
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    @Apollyon Well, if those tests would mark that as poor English, learners who would be taking them should know that, but it only proves that the tests are too limited to truly measure good writing. Although I don't recall any such rule back when i took the SAT in the late 1970s, and did rather well, too. – David Siegel Aug 10 '19 at 05:10
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    Which gives VOA no particular authority to say what correct English is. The argument from authority cuts no ice on this subject. Proscriptivism is highly outdated. – David Siegel Aug 10 '19 at 05:31
  • I don't think such nihilistic views can benefit a learner. It might be a good idea to add a caveat to your answer to remind the OP of the risks of writing anything like the first example. – Apollyon Aug 10 '19 at 05:39
  • @DavidSiegel The problem here lies in punctuation (mostly) – for clarity, the first sentence should read (and would be written by more careful writers): Could you please tell me, when can I get my check from you?, or something along those lines to denote some kind of pause or intonation change; it's ungrammatical otherwise (without the pause) as interrogative content clauses (subordinate interrogatives) do not ordinarily undergo subject–auxiliary inversion. (For more details see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Huddleston et al., 2002, p.972.) –  Aug 11 '19 at 19:17
  • See the answer by user F.E. to the question in the duplicate target I just found. –  Aug 11 '19 at 19:49
  • Some other linguists call this sort of thing ungrammatical in Standard English, but occurring and thus grammatical in non-standard dialects, which makes it even more compelling to not consider such examples when teaching Standard English. But errors occur in Standard English nevertheless (the author of this article has a PhD, and is British). –  Aug 11 '19 at 20:23
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    @userr2684291 Note that a source quoted in the 1st linked article says "the use of inverted word order in indirect questions, as in 'She asked could she go to the movies', is becoming just as much a part of informal spoken American English as indirect questions without inverted word order" and "Northeast U.S. English" is said to permit it, as of 1975. Sounds pretty standard to me, and the article a classic case of outdated prescriptivism. – David Siegel Aug 11 '19 at 20:31
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    @DavidSiegel I have taken a note of that, but I would still defer to the judgment of an actual linguist (who in spite of these findings says what he says), than to someone who thinks what they just read is "outdated prescriptivism" (this isn't accurate at all: for starters, prescriptivists don't quote studies about language; and the article is quite recent). But I only quoted it as an example of a descriptivist who says that, suggesting that not everyone agrees with what I quoted previously (Huddleston et al. (descriptivists)) – that these examples are rare but attested in Standard English. –  Aug 11 '19 at 21:19
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(I'm asking someone who I did a job for when I would be able to get a check from them for payment of the job done. – Kaique)

Both of the following questions could be answered with a "Yes" or a "NO". Could you please tell me when can I get my check from you? Could you please tell me when I can get my check from you?

I suggest you delete the first two words of your first question. "Please tell me when I can get my check from you." Then it is no longer a question, it is a request.

Robyn Simpson
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  • In actual usage, adding "Could you please tell me" simply makes the question more polite without changing the meaning in any way. Anyone answering with a simple "Yes" or "No" would be engaging in rude, smart-ass, obstructionism, somewhat like that in the old MS Helicopter joke: (https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/microsoft-helicopter-joke.3245996/ ) – David Siegel Aug 11 '19 at 19:59
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In English, you would always say:

'Could you please tell me when I can get my check from you?'

What exactly you would mean is not clear though. Would you be asking your doctor for some kind of check?

Mick
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Alan
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  • What isn't clear is whether asking two questions in the same sentence is acceptable grammatically, such as the example I gave where I change the structure of the sentence from 1 to 2 questions in the same sentence. – Kaique Aug 09 '19 at 23:51
  • I'm asking someone who I did a job for when I would be able to get a check from them for payment of the job done. – Kaique Aug 09 '19 at 23:57
  • Hi Alan! Americans spell the french word "cheque" as "check". – Robyn Simpson Aug 10 '19 at 03:02
  • @Robyn Simpson 2 you are correct that UK and some other varieties of English spell the word as "cheque", but it is not really a French word. It came to Middle English from Latin via Norman. It originally refereed to the checkerboard pattern used in the King's Exchequer to help, in keeping accounts, a sort of physical spreadsheet. From that came the royal paying agent, the "Clerke of the Cheque". And from that, the drafts were known as cheques. – David Siegel Aug 10 '19 at 05:18
  • Yes - it is a phonetic spelling I guess. – Alan Aug 10 '19 at 06:35
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    I would also wonder whether anyone has actually written a cheque since the last century - I don't believe I have had a cheque book for more than fifteen years, and it probably hadn't been used for five years before that. :-) – Alan Aug 10 '19 at 12:02