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Re: OT: sorta OT: cases: please help...

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Friday, December 7, 2001, 22:20
On Thursday, December 6, 2001, at 09:55 , laokou wrote:

> From: "Yoon Ha Lee" > >> You can also say "am student" in Korean (and, I believe, Japanese, though >> someone will have to verify this for me) where verbs don't inflect for >> person or number at all. :-) > > Yes, Japanese, too. Blew *my* mind. In high school Latin and Spanish, we > had > it inculcated that the reason you didn't need pronouns was because it was > "in the verb". Then along came Chinese and Japanese (and Korean, too, > though > I hadn't studied it then), which dropped pronouns at the drop of a hat. > Different pragmatics, different Weltanschauung. >
<G> Yeah...I tried explaining it to my Cornell friends multiple times and they *still* didn't believe me. :-p OTOH, as a sort-of-maybe Korean speaker, when I hit Latin, it was great: "You mean the verb *tells* you the person and it's all there? Sweet!"
>> What about the French "l'État, c'est moi," where "moi" (accusative?) is >> distinct from the more usual "je" (nominative?)? > > The traditional interpretation of "moi" is that it's an independent > pronoun. > "Je" is not independent. Yeah, it can be considered a kind of nominative, > I > guess, but in the sentence: >
Well, it's a good thing I included all those question marks. Thanks for the clarification.
> Similarly, in the question: > > À qui est-ce qu'il a donné le cadeau? > Who'd he give the gift to? > > The answer can't be: "me", though that's the indirect object pronoun. It' > s > "(à)? moi". (I'd say "à moi", just to play it safe) >
Moi, je le comprends maintenant. (I can't remember--can you use "le" to refer to a previous sentence?) :-p <shaking head> Why is it that I can *use* these things (even with my fading French), but can't analyze them? I must learn...:-)
>> someone else mentioned (I seem to recall) the colloquial usage in English >> of "it's me" or "that's him" vs. the prescriptivist "it is I" and "that >> is >> he." Does anyone know the origins of those colloquial forms? > > Not I. (Pas moi [not: pas je]) My linguisitics prof of twenty years ago > claimed that "me, her, him, etc..." were becoming post-verbal (as in: > (literally) following the verb) in English, while the "I, she. he" set was > pre-verbal (my terminology, not his) (Hence, "It's me."). While I think he > rightfully discarded sentences like "Him I saw." as not being to germaine > to > his main point, he didn't count in less-than-standard-but-understandable > things like, "Him and me went to the store." of "Me and Bob drove to the > A&W." or hypercorrections like (the almost ubiquitous) "between you and I. > " >
<nod> I've heard that last hypercorrection an awful lot.
> Twenty years later and I think we're still in the transition he described; > who knows if it'll come to its completion (or if this is so obsolete given > where linguistics has progressed in twenty years [God, I feel old]).
I feel young and callow, so we're even. <offering hand to shake> Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com] http://pegasus.cityofveils.com The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I'll walk carefully.--Russian proverb

Replies

Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>