Re: THEORY: English Pronouns (was Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism)

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:02:50 +1100, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:

>The correct uses actually include "It's me" and -"Who would?" - "Me!".
>I don't know where you got the idea those are wrong from; English
>pronouns don't work the same as Latin ones, what with English not being
>Latin. English doesn't have nominative or accusative cases, not even in
>pronouns. I'm not what sure what they should be called, but perhaps
>someone could inform us.
"Me" is, in origin, the accusative first-person pronoun.  English certainly
does have both nominative and accusative cases; they're just not marked on
nouns.  A language is accusatively aligned if transitive and intransitive
subjects are opposed to transitive objects.  This is surely the case with
English, as one can observe with pronouns.

>('Between you and I' makes my ears bleed, but more because I prefer
>'me' with conjunctions, I imagine; but seeing as you might tell me I
>can't say "John and me are going to the movies", and since I find it
>difficult agreeing the 'I' and 'are' in "John and I are going to the
>movies", I tend to look for alternatives in writing... (in speech I say
>whatever, I don't think far enough to find "John and I are"
>ungrammatical when it's not written and like anyone would care if I
>said "John and me are"...))
IIRC, pronouns are used in their accusative forms when objects of
prepositions (e.g. 'between you and me', 'among us', 'for them', etc).
However, since morphological caseforms in English are fossilized (existing
only in pronouns), it's common to confuse them.

>There is no "confusion in usage" (unless you mean people describing
>'Me!' as wrong); hence, there is nothing to cause it (if you mean the
>thing in brackets, it's people who think English is a relex of Latin).
English is hardly a relex of Latin. :b  Half of its vocabulary may be
bastardized Latin words, sure, but it's no more closely related to Latin
than it is to Sanskrit.

>I'd describe it as stylistic clash: similar to 'the person to who it
>happened' or 'the person whom it happened to'.
The relative pronoun in the first example should also be 'whom', from what
I understand.

>Evidently not, seeing as:
>
>> -- almost any native speaker would instead
>> answer "Us!"
>
>which just about defines 'grammatically proper'. English ain't Latin.
I'm just pointing out 'informalisms' in English.  Every language has formal
rules, some of which are bent or broken in everyday speech.  Written
language is almost always more conservative than spoken language. :)

>> I wonder if, in future English, this trend will continue, abolishing
>> all
>> distinctions between subject and object pronouns with the former taking
>> over the latter.  Things like that must have happened many times over
>> in
>> many other languages.
>
>Not the least of which is English: We've already lost 'ye' to the same
>phenomenon, though the opposite happened to 'him' (as acc. of 'it', not
>'he') and 'whom'.
Interestingly enough, 'you' is the *accusative* of 'ye'.  'Him' and 'whom'
are actually dative, not accusative forms.  'It' never had an accusative,
since it was a neuter noun - cf. 'what', ultimately from Indo-European
*kWod.

>I wouldn't be at all suprised if it happened; but I doubt I'll be alive
>when it has.
Don't underestimate our increasing ability to extend our lifespans. :b

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