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> 昨日ここへ来たのはだれですか
>
> Book translation: who is the one who came here yesterday?

My understanding is the following: 「昨日ここへ来た」 is a relative clause modifying
the pronoun 「の」 to mean "the one who came here yesterday", then は marks it as
the topic. Because the interrogative word だれ is used, "the one" must be a
person, so we use "who".

Now, can we replace 「の」 with 「者」? If so, would it be redundant because 「だれ」 is
used?

> 昨日ここへ来た者はだれですか
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question
grammar particle-の cleft-sentences
「昨日ここへ来たのはだれですか」Is の short for 者?
Syntactically, this の is a noun, and everything before it is a relative
clause. But I think it's best to treat this の as "some special noun working as
a placeholder". It's also different from what we usually call a nominalizer
(which turns 見る "see" to 見るの "seeing", etc.).

Your sentence is a [cleft
sentence](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/19208/5010), a special
construction to focus a certain part of a sentence. This の roughly corresponds
to the "placeholder _it_ " in English cleft sentences like " _It_ 's John who
ate the cake". You can see that this _it_ is specially referring to a person,
which is odd outside of this construction. Likewise, の in a cleft sentence is
a special noun which is used in place of many things including 者/人, 物, 場所/所
and 時/時間, and it is unlikely to be an abbreviation of any particular word.

  * 昨日ここへ来た **の** はだれですか？  
昨日ここへ来た **人** はだれですか？  
Who was **it** that came here yesterday?  
(This can be rephrased as "Who was _the person who_ came here yesterday?", but
that does not mean this _it_ is short for _person_.)

  * 彼がここへ来た **の** はいつですか？  
彼がここへ来た **時間** はいつですか？  
When was **it** that he came here?

  * 昨日彼が来た **の** はどこですか？  
昨日彼が来た **場所** はどこですか？  
Where was **it** that he came yesterday?

  * 昨日彼がここへ来た **の** は何故ですか？  
Why was **it** that he came here yesterday?  
(For this one, I don't know how to rewrite this using a normal noun and a
normal relative clause)
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answer