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Which of the followings is correct?

1) why you did not drink that juice?

2) why did not you drink that juice?

I think both of them are correct but I don't know which one is more formal! Any further explanations will be appreciated. :)

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  • Do you have your own guess? Perhaps based on your knowledge of how to ask questions in English... – Victor Bazarov Oct 16 '15 at 15:37
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    Possible related question "How it works?" vs. "How does it work?" – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 16 '15 at 15:56
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    @VictorBazarov: I think both of them are correct! :) but just one of them should be formal. – Hosein Rahnama Oct 16 '15 at 16:07
  • In other words, one of them could be OK only colloquially. Which one? If you can figure that out, then the other one would be the "formal" one, right? – Victor Bazarov Oct 16 '15 at 16:09
  • Yeah! I think we use number (1) more frequently in conversations! :) – Hosein Rahnama Oct 16 '15 at 16:14
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    No, that's wrong: #2 is completely ungrammatical, and cannot occur in English. However, the contracted form is legal; only the uncontracted one is illegal. – tchrist Oct 16 '15 at 16:20
  • @StoneyB: I don't see that why the second option is false! – Hosein Rahnama Oct 16 '15 at 16:36
  • @H.R. The second version is not false, it’s wrong. That’s because right does not mean true — and wrong does not mean false. – tchrist Oct 16 '15 at 16:40
  • @H.R. It's just not idiomatic. The only "why" is "because we've been voting on it continuously for several hundred years and for the last two hundred years Why DO not SUBJ VERB has been voted out of office". – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 16 '15 at 16:40
  • @StoneyB: So it is true and formal to say: "why did you not drink that juice?" – Hosein Rahnama Oct 16 '15 at 16:43
  • It is formally acceptable (as tchrist tells you, we do not use true in this sense). – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 16 '15 at 16:45
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    OK, for god sake! :D I am not an expert! I am just a learner! I really don't make any difference between words like true and right, wrong or false! :D – Hosein Rahnama Oct 16 '15 at 16:47
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    A very good question. +1 as it helps learn that the contracted version (didn't) is okay. – Maulik V Oct 17 '15 at 04:25
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    @H.R. - on ELL, right and wrong often refer to grammatical constructs. For example, I can say, The biggest ocean in the world is the Atlantic Ocean. Grammatically, that's correct, but factually, it's false. I can also say, Pacific Ocean is biggest ocean in world. Factually, that's true, but grammatically, the sentence is written wrong – it definitely needs some definite articles. So true and false refer to the accuracy of the statement, while right and wrong refer to how it's structured. – J.R. Oct 17 '15 at 10:49

1 Answers1

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Neither of the given examples is actually correct (they are both ungrammatical in modern English). The phrase should be either:

Why did you not drink that juice?

or

Why didn't you drink that juice?

The first one ("did you not") is the more formal of the two; the contracted form ("didn't you") is much more likely to be heard in conversation.

This has been covered in ELU under the answer to this question: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8372/do-you-not-vs-dont-you

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