# Historical basis for prescriptivist use of "He and I ..."



## Abu Talha

Hello,

Many native English speakers today would say "Me and him did such-and-such ". Such usage is prescriptively considered incorrect. However, my question is 

1. whether there is historical evidence that English speakers (even before Modern English) used the nominative case for the pronouns in such cases, and also
2.  if they placed the second and third person before the first in a list, i.e., "Bob and I", not "I/me and Bob".

The reason I ask this is because I once read that English grammarians (perhaps because of their classical educations) sometimes forced Latin constructions in English and prescribed them as correct. I would like to know if this is the case here.

Thanks.


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## Hulalessar

Whilst the old grammarians did indeed introduce some rules of Latin grammar into English I do not think that this was one of them, not least because Latin was a null-subject language and subject pronouns were rather thin on the ground. English has moved quite a long way from synthesis to analysis so that in modern English getting the words in the right order is far more significant than getting the right form of a word. An exception is pronouns where distinct forms for different purposes are still very much alive. Even so, in certain constructions the strict rules may break down. One such is where a subject pronoun gets separated from the verb by a noun or another pronoun so that the speaker sort of feels a lack of connection between the first pronoun and the verb. Many people who would say "Me and him did such-and-such" would never say "Me did such-and-such". "Me" and other object pronouns have almost become disjunctive pronouns functioning in the same way as the French "moi" etc where their use has become standard. In French you must say "Jean et moi avons fait tel et tel".

As to the word order, putting the first person pronoun last was always a matter of etiquette rather than grammar. "I and John did such-and-such" is not incorrect standard English. Insistence on putting the "I" second notoriously leads to the hypercorrect "He gave it to John and I" in speakers who would never say "He gave it to I". The intervention of "and" is sufficient to suspend the usual rule.


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## fdb

The English rule about naming yourself last (is it a grammatical rule or merely a matter of etiquette?) certainly does not hold true in Latin. A quick perusal of the article “ego” in Lewis and Short reveals this from Plautus: “meruimus et ego et pater”, where in English one would say “my father and I”.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Many people who would say "Me and him did such-and-such" would never say "Me did such-and-such".


True. On the other hand _Me did such-and-such_ sound quite familiar in dialectal speech in some regions. I'd say there is a general trend to replace the the nominative personal pronouns with the corresponding objective case pronoun. It happened with the 2nd plural (_you_ replaced _ye_) and in dialects where the 2nd singular is still in use, it happened there too (_thee didst __such-and-such_ instead of _thou didst __such-and-such_).


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## francisgranada

Isn't this a "natural" continuation of the elimination of the "rests" of the declension? I.e. to use only one form, namely the objective case, which can be used also with prepositions, thus more "obvious". There are examples in other languages as well, e.g. the Italian _lui, lei_ (instead of egli, ella), but also the colloquial/regional usage of _te_ instead of _tu_.


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## Cenzontle

> However, my question is
> 1. whether there is *historical evidence*...


Where can we go to find what was the early usage in English?


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## Abu Talha

Thanks very much, for your informative replies. Is the same also true of keeping the pronoun in the nominative in the predicate of "is/was"? That there is historical evidence that this is indigenous to English and not forced, either from a foreign language or by some sort of logic.

I can hardly imagine a native speaker saying "It is I" in natural speech as a complete sentence rather than "It's me." (Perhaps it's my lack of imagination ).


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## berndf

Cenzontle said:


> Where can we go to find what was the early usage in English?


Old English was a V2 language (like modern German). I.e. it didn't matter whether you put the subject or the object in first position as long as the verb is in second.
_Ic seah hine (I saw him)_
and
_Hine seah ic (Him saw I)_
meant the same, the difference was only in emphasis: The second word order emphasized whom I saw, _him_ and not someone else.

Accordingly, replacing the nominative _ic _with the accusative _mec_/_me_ would have yielded an uninterpretable sentence.


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## Cenzontle

> "Me" and other object pronouns have almost become disjunctive pronouns functioning in the same way as the French "moi" etc


I'm satisfied that the ancestor, in Old English, of modern "me" or of "him"—alone—would not do for a subject.
But is there any O.E. precedent for the counterpart of "me and him" (object forms when *conjoined*​) as a subject?


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## berndf

Cenzontle said:


> But is there any O.E. precedent for the counterpart of "me and him" (object forms when *conjoined*​) as a subject?


Extremely unlikely, virtually impossible after what I just explained. Even in ME, the MED shown no attestations.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> True. On the other hand _Me did such-and-such_ sound quite familiar in dialectal speech in some regions. I'd say there is a general trend to replace the the nominative personal pronouns with the corresponding objective case pronoun. It happened with the 2nd plural (_you_ replaced _ye_) and in dialects where the 2nd singular is still in use, it happened there too (_thee didst __such-and-such_ instead of _thou didst __such-and-such_).



It is certainly a feature of some dialects, notably that of Southwestern (English) English, to use object pronouns as subject pronouns and vice versa.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> It is certainly a feature of some dialects, notably that of Southwestern (English) English, to use object pronouns as subject pronouns and vice versa.



I think I've heard British English speakers say "me was", but I don't recall ever hearing/seeing the present-tense equivalent "me am". Do people say this, or is it possible that "I'm" has come to be seen as a conjugated verb form rather than a combination of subject pronoun + verb?


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## Cenzontle

So... when and how did the "him and me" subject come to be used by speakers who wouldn't use "him" or "me" as a subject?
Are there theories about this, and what is the evidence?


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## barbour

berndf said:


> Old English was a V2 language (like modern German). I.e. it didn't matter whether you put the subject or the object in first position as long as the verb is in second.
> _Ic seah hine (I saw him)_
> and
> _Hine seah ic (Him saw I)_
> meant the same, the difference was only in emphasis: The second word order emphasized whom I saw, _him_ and not someone else.



Read Horace in Latin!! This is probably some symbiotic influence of Latin and possibly other concurrent languages being used then. Were we to speak emphatically what we always mean in English, our language would be poetic, rather than perfunctory.


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## berndf

Nothing to do with influence. Old English and Latin inherited their case systems from their common ancestor. The development of English into a language with relatively fixed word order goes hand in hand with the loss of this case system.

An important difference between Latin an Old English is that Old English was a V2 language which makes the SOV word order that is very frequent in Latin ungrammatical in Old English.

The V2 rule has actually quite strong repercussions on word order. E.g. in modern English you say:
1. He lost the match.
2. By the way, he lost the match.
Were English still a V2 language, 2. would have to change imperatively to:
2a. By the way lost he the match.


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## Gavril

Cenzontle said:


> So... when and how did the "him and me" subject come to be used by speakers who wouldn't use "him" or "me" as a subject?
> Are there theories about this, and what is the evidence?



Maybe there is a tendency to treat _and_ like a preposition, which changes a following pronoun to a specific case-form. Just as we say "with me" rather than "with I", some people say "and me" rather than "and I". This is just a guess on my part.


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## Cenzontle

> Maybe there is a tendency to treat _and like a preposition_


That's inspired, Gavril!
We see the same thing happening with "than":  "He's taller than I" > "He's taller than me".


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## Kevin Beach

I suspect this is a phenomenon of Late Modern BrE.

Culturally, the "He and I did ... " approach was heavily encouraged when I was a child, because it's both grammatically correct and polite.

"Me and him did ...." always was and remains common among those who simply haven't been taught otherwise.

In the post 20 years an over-correction has sprung up among people who were taught the correct sequence and case, but not the reason for them. Therefore, statements like "He gave it to Jim and I" are common.

Jamaican patois has had increasing influence among young English-born people, including white youngsters who blend it into their colloquial speech to sound "cool". It's common to hear complete reversals of grammar, like "Me tell she" for "I told her".


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## Dib

I am quite wary of writing this post, as it is rather off-topic, and if  we do like to discuss it further it should go into a different thread,  but I'd like to throw in a quick comment or two on the Old English word  order that has been incidentally mentioned here. OE has many  exceptions/constraints on V2 realization. Thus:



berndf said:


> An important difference between Latin an Old English is that Old English was a V2 language which makes the SOV word order that is very frequent in Latin ungrammatical in Old English.
> 
> The V2 rule has actually quite strong repercussions on word order. E.g. in modern English you say:
> 1. He lost the match.
> 2. By the way, he lost the match.
> Were English still a V2 language, 2. would have to change imperatively to:
> 2a. By the way lost he the match.



a) SOV order is occasionally used in OE ... even in main clauses and  even in original (i.e. non-translated) prose. Apparently, Cichosz  (2010: 73–74) estimated them at as high as 15% in such cases.  Unfortunately, I have no access to the book, and couldn't verify the  statistics.
b) In OE-kind of V2 (if it is indeed V2), actually, "By  the way, he lost the match" would be acceptable, I believe. V2 inversion  often (normally?) didn't operate with pronominal subjects, but  sometimes also with nominal subjects. Peter S. Baker's "Introduction to  Old English" (3rd Ed.: 116) quotes: "Eac swylce ða nytenu ... comon to  Noe" ("also thus, the beasts ... came to Noa").

---

Sorry for the digression. Please, continue.


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## berndf

Thanks for the info and the reference, Dib.


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## Cenzontle

> "Me and him did ...." always was and remains common among those who simply haven't been taught otherwise.


This goes for AE as well as BE.  "Me and him did it" or "Me and him done it."


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## tonyspeed

Kevin Beach said:


> I suspect this is a phenomenon of Late Modern BrE.
> 
> Culturally, the "He and I did ... " approach was heavily encouraged when I was a child, because it's both grammatically correct and polite.
> 
> "Me and him did ...." always was and remains common among those who simply haven't been taught otherwise.
> 
> In the post 20 years an over-correction has sprung up among people who were taught the correct sequence and case, but not the reason for them. Therefore, statements like "He gave it to Jim and I" are common.
> 
> Jamaican patois has had increasing influence among young English-born people, including white youngsters who blend it into their colloquial speech to sound "cool". It's common to hear complete reversals of grammar, like "Me tell she" for "I told her".


Interestingly,  we would not say that in Jamaica.  We would say" mi tell aar (her)"  or in rural forms" mi tell ihn (him) ".  Mi tell she is incorrect in our grammar.


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## Kevin Beach

tonyspeed said:


> Interestingly,  we would not say that in Jamaica.  We would say" mi tell aar (her)"  or in rural forms" mi tell ihn (him) ".  Mi tell she is incorrect in our grammar.



It must have got a bit lost in the translation when it reached the UK!


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## Gavril

Kevin Beach said:


> It must have got a bit lost in the translation when it reached the UK!



Or perhaps it's based on the speech of a different area? E.g., I've heard that some people in Nigeria use constructions like _They found we_, where nominative is used for subject and object.


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## tonyspeed

Kevin Beach said:


> It must have got a bit lost in the translation when it reached the UK!



There are other Caribbean islands where this is normal.


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## bearded

Gavril said:


> Maybe there is a tendency to treat _and_ like a preposition, which changes a following pronoun to a specific case-form. Just as we say "with me" rather than "with I", some people say "and me" rather than "and I". This is just a guess on my part.


If your surmise were correct, to the question ''who did that?'' a possible reply could be  ''I and them'' (object case only after 'and').


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## Gavril

bearded man said:


> If your surmise were correct, to the question ''who did that?'' a possible reply could be  ''I and them'' (object case only after 'and').



While I don't think "I and them" is commonly used, I've certainly heard "me and them" or similar.

Maybe the pattern here is that _I/he/she/we/they_ only appear directly before a verb (in other words, they are functioning like conjugational affixes).


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## bearded

Gavril said:


> While I don't think "I and them" is commonly used, I've certainly heard "me and them" or similar.
> 
> Maybe the pattern here is that _I/he/she/we/they_ only appear directly before a verb (in other words, they are functioning like conjugational affixes).


Then it does not depend on 'and' with prepositional function.


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## Gavril

bearded man said:


> Then it does not depend on 'and' with prepositional function.



That could still be a factor: see for example _Me and them were there yesterday, _where _them_ (rather than _they_) appears directly before the verb.


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