"is is"

[D. Ezra Johnson]

>>"I thought that knowing who Tartaglia is is a requirement for >>joining
>>this list".  [Tartaglia was a Medieval Italian >>mathematician.]  Is this
>>sentence grammatical?
>
>IMHO, grammatical beyond question, although prosodically somewhat
>challenging to the reader.
>
>
IMH idiolect, ungrammatical, but for a different reason. "Think" has to
agree in tense with the clause following it.

So I can't say "I thought that he is from France" or the above quote.

But the following are both OK by me:

I think that knowing who Tartaglia is is a requirement for joining this
list.

I thought that knowing who Tartaglia is was a requirement for joining this
list.

The embedded part, about Tartaglia, is free to be "is" or "was", and would
almost certainly come out "was" in the second sentence.

Daniel
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com