On an oddity of Georgian and Regency prose.

A grammatical oddity of Georgian and Regency English literary prose, that is. Namely: they do weird things with comparatives and superlatives.

Jane Austen is incredibly careful to put solecisms in the mouths of the John Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the world and never into Catherine Morland's or Fitzwilliam Darcy's. Incredibly attentive to colloquialism, and scornful of those who depend on it overmuch -- think of Thorpe's "famous" this and that, of Maria Lucas and Lydia Bennet starting every other sentence with "La!," of Mrs. Elton's being always quite excessively shocked, and of the occasional "power of" xyz (where we would be more likely to say "heaps of"). Her narrators don't speak like that. Sometimes they speak strangely to us who would never use "eat" as a past participle ("when they had eat and were done..." and such), but perfectly grammatically for the time. Yet her fine speakers don't seem to distinguish comparatives and superlatives clearly as such. Oh, sure, comparatives are still used to compare -- you see "A is better than B" and not "A is best than B" -- it's not all the way to speaker incompetence. But over and over, "which [of two] was the handsomest," "whether A or B were tallest," when comparisons of two just can't take a superlative as we speak, not without a context strongly suggesting generalization they can't. You could say, "Which do you like best?" of two things without paying or drawing attention to their number, but "which of these two do you like" will always end in "better." Not so for Jane Austen. Very interesting!

And on the other hand the narrator of Pride & Prejudice definitely says "either of A, B, and C," when for us "either" can never branch into three, no matter the context. Very odd!

And for the Georgian:

"On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the 17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons."

That's from the Brobdingnagian section of Gulliver's Travels. So for Swift "whether" was the right way to say "which (of two)" in more cases than we would say it in. We'd say "do you know whether you are going or not?" or just "I don't know whether you are going?" And we'd say "do you know which of those you want?" or "which do you want?" or "I don't know which." But we would never say "I don't know whether." In Greek or Latin you can do that with the "whether"/"which (of two)" words, so perhaps that's the source of his comfort. But Gulliver's Travels is pretty far from fussily written. So maybe you could actually say that then! Wouldn't that be interesting?