THEORY: Re : THEORY: Natural language change (was Re: Charlie and I)

Dans un courrier dat=E9 du 20/09/99 06:09:10  , Thomas a =E9crit :

> A point in case: generations of
>  people have been told to say "whom" as an objective relative pronoun,
>  and yet its use has been in sharp decline at the same time as there
>  has been a general increase in the availability of education to the
>  common man.  I'd say that the decline in the instruction of formal
>  grammar* is a result of, not a cause of, the general feeling that these
>  changes are in many cases already so extensive that to counter them
>  would require near-fascist tactics with respect to language (a la
>  Atat=FCrk earlier this century), which most people would consider
>  unacceptable, as government policies go
i'd think that the use of "who" even where acc/dat is expected is
linked to putting (resumptive) prepositions in the end of the (sub)clause :

"the man (who) i walk with (him)"
"the man (who) i talk about (him)"

as if some head-resumptive pronoun were implied.
so incredibly similar to current - yet very incorrect - french slang's trend =
:

"l'homme que je marche avec (lui)"
"l'homme que je parle de lui".

note that cr=E9ole and asian languages already use that handy - and
so beautiful to my own liking - syntactic device since ages.

mathias