Various nonsense...NIK: etc.

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 10 Mar 2005, at 19:28, Jon Jarrett wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Henderson Keith wrote:
>> Since there are so many language experts here, I was wondering if
>> someone
>> could confirm my suspicion about the (lack of) the English dative.  I
>> mean,
>> it occurred to me that the English 'whom' (which is itself now dying
>> a slow
>> death) might be a vestigal linguistic organ of the German (dative
>> case)
>> 'wem.'  Is that true?  And is that the only such example?
>
>         Modern English, in so far as it still has any cases at all, has
> only one object case, which serves for direct (`accusative') and
> indirect
> (`dative') object. I think there *are* still one or two words which
> preserve it other than `whom' but I can't call them to mind any more.

"Him" springs to mind :)  "Them" kind of counts as well (though that's
really a borrowing from the Scandinavian dative plural; the Old English
third person dative plural was "hem", which some believe survives in
the apparent contraction "'em").

But in general, yes, Modern English pronouns hold the last vestiges of
the Old English case system (which was not so different from the other
West Germanic case systems).

I guess "methinks" is another example, though a rather affected
archaism these days :)  The "me" part is dative (Old English first
person singular dative and sometimes accusative pronoun "me", surviving
as the Modern English first person objective), as the construction
literally means "(it) thinks to me/(it) seems to me".

> As
> to `whom', it is almost certainly (Carl will know better than
> I--ahem) cognate with German `wem' but how they've wound up different
> cases with the same ending is anyobody's guess.

The Modern English objective case pronouns are kind of a combination of
the accusative and dative pronouns.  The Old English masculine and
femine third person singular accusative pronouns were, respectively,
hwone and hwæne (the neuter was hwæt), while their dative counterparts
were hwam (as was the neuter) and hwæn.  The distinction got blurred
during the Middle English period, and we end up with whom in all object
case positions.

>> Oh, by the way, more than a few English words are slipping back into
>> German
>> (or Swiss dialect) the opposite way, you know.  'Ausflippen' is my
>> favorite
>> of these, being that it's half-translated (from 'flip out' obviously).

Bizarrely, this ends up in Peninsular Spanish as "flipear" (flip
out/freak out) as well!

>> 'Flirten' is the verb 'to flirt,'
>> complete with improper German 'i' pronunciation, unbeknownst to me at
>> first.
>> It goes on.

My sister and I used to play this game in our high school German
classes ;)  Ich trippe, du tripst, er/sie/es tript, wir trippen ...
("to, like, drop acid, man ...")

;)

Cheers,
Carl


--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/