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

From: "Yoon Ha Lee"

> Christopher Wright wrote:
> >  Christophe Grandsire
> 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.

> >> Besides, there's only one language I know of which happens to use the
> >> accusative as the "object" of a verb "to be". That's Classical Arabic,
in
> >> tenses other than present (where there is no need for a copula, and
both
> > parts
> >> of the sentences are then in the nominative case). But in Classical
> > Arabic, in
> >> some kinds of sentences (including main clauses) you can mark the
subject
> > with
> >> the accusative case! So the only language I know of which behaves the
way
> > you
> >> describe it is a rather pathological case.
Oh dear. Pathological. In Géarthnuns, "to be" can take an accusative, but it
involves a lexical shift. When it's really "be", it's
nominative-nominative-copula:

Sí la sau teshers nöi.
I-nom present a cat-nom be
I am a cat.

Nominative-accusative-nöi, however, means "resemble, be like":

Öçek la chö dhabsöt nöi.
you-nom pres the father-acc be
You look like/are like your father.

But that's different, isn't it. So I don't feel so pathological.

> 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:

The person to whom you refer, sir, is I.

(stilted English, but viable) "je" is not an option as the last word,
although it's "nominative"; you must use "moi".

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)

So, subject, direct, and indirect object pronouns cannot exist in French
without a verb floating in the vicinity. That's what independent pronouns
are for. And the independent pronouns are filling in the grammatical spaces,
while those famous pronouns become clitics. Hence, in a sentence like:

Je te blague. /St(@)bla:g/ I'm kidding you.

you get with ever increasing frequency sentences like:

Moi, je te blague. /mwa  St(@)bla:g/
Je te blague, moi.
Je te blague, toi.
Moi, je te blague, toi.
Etc.

>  And
> 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."
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]).

Kou

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