From: HOW GRAMMARS OF ENGLISH HAVE MISSED THE BOAT (ref above)
Consider the English pronoun pairs, her : she, him : he, me : I, us : we, and them : they. It is easy to show that the uses of these paired forms are not directly related to functional (subject and object) “cases” in the manner of Latin and Anglo-Saxon but exhibit uses that remind us more than a little of the Romance languages. If the educated generally say a kind of Frenchified “Martha and myself arrived late” and “That’s me” (just like French). Marilyn Monroe was made to sound silly by saying “That's I!” Why then do grammarians ignore the significance of such indicators of the system of English? Can’t they guess why quasi-French usages like “Me and my father cleaned the house up today"—typical of that legendary 13 3/4-year-old British adolescent, Adrian Mole—have proved so ineradicable?...
Shouldn’t your grammar offer you some hint of an explanation for usages of pronoun forms in the English of educated people—individuals who would never say “to I”, “to she,” or “for we,” who nevertheless use constructs “to she and I”; “to she who knows”; “on we in Europe”; and “for we Europeans”—the last from the mouth of a British prime minister, a former university professor? Is it irrelevant that, in French, one says the equivalent of “to she and he”? While the English system is not the French system, the affinities of the one with the other are hard to overlook. |
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Hello JT
I'm interested in this line of thought, but it has some weaknesses.
Point 1
It's true that in French you can say e.g. 'lui et moi partons demain' (he and I are leaving tomorrow) or 'à elle et à moi' (to her and me).
Bailey relates this to e.g. 'Me and my father etc' on the one hand, and 'to she and I' on the other. However, this is not an exact analogy. 'Moi', 'toi', etc are disjunctive pronouns. In some contexts, they are the equivalent of 'me', etc., in others of 'I', etc. But there isn't a direct correlation.
If the French version were 'me et mon père', or 'à elle et à je', the point would be stronger. But as it is, Bailey isn't comparing like with like.
Point 2
Bailey argues that this 'Frenchified' usage dates from the Norman-French invasion. If that's the case, we have the problem of explaining how the syntax of the conquerors became the syntax of the 'underclass'. ('Me and my father', in BrE at least, is not a 'prestigious' structure: it's associated with e.g. Cockney and Estuary English.)
Point 3
It's not enough to say that the structure appears in modern French. To demonstrate that 'me and my father'/'for you and I' is indeed based on an imported French usage, we would need three things:
1. Evidence that the 'me and my father' structure wasn't used in Old English.
2. Evidence that it was used in C11 Norman-French.
3. Evidence that it was used in Middle English.
I've glanced through some likely texts, but haven't yet found any such evidence. That isn't to say it doesn't exist; it would naturally be unusual in chronicles and poetry, which are what we mostly have. But I think it's up to Bailey to provide at least a few illustrations.
Point 4
A very minor point; but I'm not sure who the British PM is, who says '...for we Europeans' and is a 'university professor'. Thatcher studied chemistry, then law. Major left school at 16. Blair is a lawyer. All are capable of the phrase, unfortunately. But I'm not sure anyone's case is strengthened by citing the words of a British PM – past or present.
MrP