I had another typical hermetic Sunday, yesterday. I successfully shut off my computer and phone and tried to exist on my own. It was hard. It was starting to rain, and I didn't take a long walk.
I read some parts of Paradise Lost. I don't really like it, but it's one of those gaps in my literary background that I feel needs filling in. So then I was trying to study Korean. That frustrated me, too.
My mother and I traded some emails recently on the topic of pronoun mis-use. Apparently in my blog in a recent entry, I'd written "a picture of my friend and I" when, grammatically, it should have been "a picture of my friend and me." This is use of "I" in the object case is called "hypercorrection" because it has in the past been perceived by linguists as some kind of response to too much correction by teachers of students' mis-use of "me" in the subject case: it is long-established that colloquial English allows "Me and him went to the store," while grammar teachers abhor it.
Here's what I wrote in my email to my mom.
I had one idea (thought? observation?) about it. Some languages mark
something like noun case on the basis of things other than grammatical
role. As a relevant example, Korean includes grammatical role in its
case marking particles, but these particles also include things like
conjunctive and topical markers that are added to words on the basis of
things like psychological saliency-to-the-speaker. I have been
speculating that a lot of the "drift" we see in colloquial English
around the "mis-use" of pronoun case (e.g. "Me and him went to the party,
but that's a secret just between you and I") is that English's case
system, being so weak and "unmarked" in most situations (i.e. nouns
don't show it anymore, and some pronouns don't either – e.g. "you") that
the grammatical underpinning of the system has begun to float around,
and other aspects that can influence a case-marking system, such as
saliency (in e.g. Korean or Japanese), are coming into play.
If
in just a short 1000 years English can evolve a grammatical system more
similar Chinese than its indo-european brethren, why couldn't it just as
easily begin to evolve a case-marking system similar to Korean (I'm not talking about the particles/agglutinative aspect, but just that there might be something evolving like a "topic" case where the grammatical role plays no part in its deployment)?
What I'm listening to right now.
King Crimson, "Elephant Talk." But what case are their pronouns in?