🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <kh-rv7a@lynx.unm.edu>, lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY) writes:
> In article <29384@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>>Oddly enough, very few people have problems with "he" and "him", quite a
>>few have problems with "me" and "I", and most people have problems with
>>"who" and "whom", yet the rules in each case are identical.
> 
> This is true only if by "rules" you mean "'objective' descriptions of
> distribution"---and then only if you ignore speaker-internal variation and
> if you are in certain varieties of English which are not spoken often by
> most English speakers.  If, on the other hand, "rule" refers to the
> principle in the speaker's head which characterizes their language, then
> the troubles to which this thread has been devoted are prima facie evidence
> that the rules are *not* the same.

Plenty of people have trouble with _he_ and _him_.  In the varieties of
English that I'm familiar with, great difficulties arise whenever a pronoun
with contrasting nominative and accusative forms is cojoined to another
NP (or pronoun) with _and_.  For many speakers, nominative forms are
barred from such phrases, _he_ as surely as _I_.

And then there's the myth that English possesses a predicate *nominative*.
For many speakers it's consistently a predicate *accusative*: it's me,
it's him, etc.

_Who_ and _whom_ follow a different pattern: they *cannot* be cojoined
to anything except _what?_ and _which_, and then only rarely.  So the
forced accusative seen in _Me and him don't like her_ is not paralelled
by a *Whom and him did that? (= Who(m) did he do that with?)

Well, enough diatribe.  _Myself_ is an attempt to avoid deciding between
_me_ and _I_.  See my next post for a new thing to fight about.
                                                               
--Leo Connolly