A narrow room, whose end and side windows - Tradução em português

"I found a narrow room, whose end and side windows were closed by falling stones."

Na frase acima é possível saber exatamente a quem o end se refere? Refere-se à sala (fundo da sala) ou às janelas (janelas do fundo)? A dupla interpretação é possível, diante desse texto?

WELLS, H.G. The Time Machine. Penguin Readers Level 4. Pearson Education, 2008, p. 31.

ENTENDENDO AS HORAS EM INGLÊS
Nesta aula, a professora Camila Oliveira ensina vários macetes para você nunca mais se confundir na hora de dizer as horas em inglês. ACESSAR AULA
3 respostas
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PPAULO 6 49 1.3k
I would say that while reading you would make a pause there:

"I found a narrow room, [whose end] and side windows were closed by falling stones."

I signalled that pause with square brackets, it´s that "and" here works as a comma. Similar thing happens with "e" in Portuguese (in some instances), but that is not the subject at hand.
We could also say that it works like a "proximity agreement rule" where "narrow room" is immediately close to "end".

With the reading, you will see that "whose end" refers to "narrow room", it´s not a conjuction (then a connector of words or sentences).
Another example of such ambiguous translation is with the sentence "where were you?" to a new learner (a Brazilian for example) it would sound a bit awkward. Then, with time he will know that the first word is "where" then "were".
To a native is a natural thing, they don´t have to think about it, it comes automatically without needing to appeal to grammar rules.
PPaulo, dentro dessa linha de raciocínio, eu também poderia dizer que a breve pausa na leitura poderia estar após o whose, ficando o "end and side windows" agrupados em uma mesma estrutura.
PPAULO 6 49 1.3k
Well, it´s standard usage to think of the comma as a pause, similar to how our
"e" with a function of "vírgula" (it happens sometimes).

It seems like my very last example with "where were" mislead more than it helped, but forget that one and think of the first part of my posting. What I meant is that some kind of collocations come to mind by repetition. We see or hear a construction and we get used to it, we get to know which is which.

Back to the crux:
"I found a narrow room, [whose end] and side windows were closed by falling stones."
Here, we can distinctly see that whose and end are a pair (we could think of whose as an "antecedent"), they work together in the sentence. By pausing at "whose" it would turn it into an isolated piece since the first comma is a pause as well.
"Whose" indeed provides information about "end", the pair lead us to ask,
Whose end is that? The end of the narrow room.

"end and...", In its turn would make the second part ambiguous, which is what we should avoid.
I hope this clarifies things a bit more.