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

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

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