Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 August 7

= August 7 =

Compound subjects
The article Compound subject says that sometimes people say:

Johnny and me are coming tomorrow (possibly because of the lack of direct agreement between me and are).

I don't see why that is the reason it is a common mistake to put compound subjects in the objective case. I see it more as coming from the mis-treatment of and as a preposition, meaning that me is the object of and. Any thoughts on how this mistake actually originated?? (A new habit is that after I type ~ the computer changes it to a much larger group of ~'s.) Georgia guy (talk) 15:40, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I've always wondered the same. Not being a native English speaker, I follow the grammar, not necessarily an established convention. Another example is Spike Witwicky's line in the Transformers comics: "I'll make it. Us Witwickys always do." Why is it not "We Witwickys always do"? J I P  &#124; Talk 18:19, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Because it's funnier that way (intentionally or not). I'm reminded of an old cigarette ad: "Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!" <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 18:38, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I restored the sidebar with examples to that article, without which it's hard to read since the text refers to the examples.
 * I don't think that parenthetical makes any sense in that context. The article says in compound subjects in informal speech, me occurs in this position, e.g. Johnny and me are coming tomorrow, which I take to imply that this is valid informal speech. Then it adds (possibly because of the lack of direct agreement between me and are). What is that an explanation of? It's not the reason why the phrase is valid, nor the reason why it is informal. It looks like an explanation of why some people might think it was "a mistake", along the lines of me am coming tomorrow, but that's not what the rest of the text says. Unless I'm reading it wrongly, this needs fixing. Card Zero  (talk) 19:04, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

First off, the true "basilectal" form is "me and...". In the areas of the United States where I grew up, kids who didn't bother to listen to adult ideas of correctness would naturally say things like "Me and Johnny went to the store", or "Me and him went to the store" (when they would never say "Me went to the store" or "Him went to the store", of course). In the early 1990s, Geoff Pullum wrote an essay about how there might be some linguistic basis for pronoun forms in English conjoined phrases being subject to different rules than non-conjoined pronouns. I can't find that on-line now, but here's a somewhat similar thing by Pullum: https://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/the-negative-canon-noun-phrase-and-ime-2/ -- AnonMoos (talk) 21:52, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * In his 1986 paper Grammatically Deviant Prestige Constructions, Joseph Emonds argues that in Modern English, personal pronouns are marked for case only in an artificial version of English, passed on by formal education (hence "grammatically deviant"). He argues that there are not enough examples of grammatical surviving in English to allow a learner to extract it as a concept, and proposes an alternative,rule by which the so-called subject pronouns are licensed in the English which is learnt naturally by children: a rule which is purely syntactic. (The opaqueness and unnaturalness of the "prestige" rule accounts, of course, for the prevalence of hypercorrection). This syntactic rule does not percolate into conjunctions, so Johnny and me (or me and Johnny, but that's another issue) is natural in subject as well as other roles. ColinFine (talk) 23:13, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Just to be clear, in formal English, subject pronouns are used in the subjects of sentences, so the correct compound subject is "Johnny and I are". The reason we do it this way is that that is the rules of formal English.  Formal English has a prescriptive grammar, and while there is not an "official" language body like in other languages (c.f. Académie Française) there are still rules that most style guides and the like all agree on as proper formal English, and this is one of them.  The speakers of any one of the natural English dialects are not bound to these rules; those dialects develop their own rules for determining when something is within the dialect or marked as being incorrect.  There are many English dialects for which "Johnny and me are" is fine.  Formal English is not one of them.  -- Jayron 32
 * Jayron32, I merely want to know how this actually originated. I would guess it originated with the mistake of perceiving the word and as a preposition rather than a conjunction and thus that the word me is the object of and. Is this how the mistake originated?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:37, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * In the article Oblique case, he and I is contrasted with me and him. I'm dubious about the idea of a conjunction having an object (since apples and oranges is logically the same as oranges and apples) but presumably both things can't be the object, so no, that can't be the reason for using me, or for using him in this example, because if it was, you'd expect I and him are ... or he and me are ..., which would be weird. Card Zero  (talk) 16:23, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * As with many things linguistic, looking for a certain, reliable, causal agent is a futile effort. Linguistics is not physics, where we can reliably say "if you push object X with force Y, it will undergo acceleration Z".  There are some rather fuzzy possible causes, listed at Language change, specifically a Syntactic change, much of this is what is known as drift, which is a sort of causeless evolution of a language.  Drift can be complex, as in things like the Great Vowel Shift, where a complex set of dominoes led to a complex change, but even that didn't have a reason or a purpose, in the sense that we could have, had we known about the initial conditions predicted that it would have occured. -- Jayron 32 18:22, 8 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Georgia_guy -- In some languages much of the function of a word like English "and" is done by means of the Comitative case, but I doubt whether the comitative case has much to do with English vernacular pronouns... AnonMoos (talk) 23:31, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * For example, the Japanese word "to" is often translated into English as "and", but it can only have this meaning when connecting nouns (not as a sentence conjunction), and it can also mean "together with", "along with" when following a single noun. So it's much more of a comitative case marker (postposition) than it is a conjunction in the way that English "and" is... AnonMoos (talk) 09:23, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
 * GeorgiaGuy, in languages which use grammatical case (which, as I argued above, does not include most forms of modern English, apart from the "deviant" prestige version) it is normal for case to percolate inside a conjunction. So in that weird version of English, it is not, and never was "a mistake". ColinFine (talk) 11:06, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It should also be noted that linguists don't really use a word like "mistake", which implies that there is a normative "ideal" language, and that variations from it are undesirable; that places too much value on what they do. The more used term for cases like this is that the usage is "marked", which roughly means that one's interlocutor recognizes what one is saying, but also recognizes that there is something "a bit off" about it.  Markedness is distinct to particular dialects; what is marked in one dialect could feel natural in another.  The use of object pronouns in compound subjects is definitely marked in any "formal English" register, but may be comfortable and normal for many other dialects of English.  Indeed, in many of these dialects, the use of the subject pronoun (i.e. "Jimmy and I are..."), within that social context, may feel marked as overly formal and stuffy.  It is all about context.-- Jayron 32 15:13, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

This is the reverse of "between you and I". --Theurgist (talk) 20:41, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
 * "Between you and I" originated as a hypercorrection by people whose use of "me" in conjoined subject phrases was constantly corrected... AnonMoos (talk) 21:22, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Could the conflation have been a French influence? I don't know how old it is. In French, you can't say *je et tu, you have to say toi et moi. Similarly, you can't say *c'est je "it is I", you have to say c'est moi "it's me". Similarly with "Us Tareyton smokers". It strikes me as suspicious that you'd get such similar patterns in two neighboring languages, esp. when one has influenced the other so strongly. -- kwami (talk) 03:16, 13 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Kwamikagami -- The two cases aren't quite analogous, because "Moi" isn't really an object form (though it does occur after prepositions), but appears whenever the 1st person singular pronoun takes stress ("Je" and "Me" are only unstressed/clitic). "Moi" is often called the disjunct pronoun form... AnonMoos (talk) 03:33, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Map in Ancient Greek
Is there any map of Greece, or of areas surrounding it, made in modern times with place names written in Ancient Greek? Please note that I'm not asking for ancient maps originally made in Ancient Greek that probably don't even exist. Thank you! 95.245.16.252 (talk) 17:42, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * To the Commonsmobile! Here's one. There are others on Wikimedia Commons under Category:Maps_of_ancient_Greece. Oh, sorry, you wanted Greek text, and this is transliterated to the Roman alphabet. Hmm. Card Zero  (talk) 19:28, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * , apparently. Nice map, but not entirely Ancient Greek. The note under the title, complete with Roman numerals, is a bit of a giveaway; as is the complete absence of the Greek alphabet. ;-) Bazza (talk) 19:33, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It has the advantage of being an SVG, which means the labels can all be deleted and replaced with Ancient Greek alternatives, but that means getting the SVG to render a suitable font, which could be a mission. Maybe it's simple, maybe not. I tried opening the file in notepad and just replacing one of the labels with Ancient Greek, but it still rendered in the Roman alphabet, because of the font, I assume. In fact they must be saved as paths as well as text, because changing the text in the file does nothing. Inkscape could probably sort this out. Card Zero  (talk) 19:49, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The label "Tyrins" rather than "Tiryns" on that map is rather suspicious. Deor (talk) 23:42, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * How about this one?. I suspect it's labelled in Modern Greek, but I don't know how different that is in respect of historical placenames. There are others in Commons:Category:Greek-language maps showing history. ColinFine (talk) 23:23, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * The name of Athens is definitely in a non-ancient form. Also, the stress marks appear to be in a modern "monotonic" form... AnonMoos (talk) 23:26, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * By the way, ten years ago there was an attempt to set up an ancient Greek Wikisource (some even wanted an ancient Greek Wikipedia), but all that's left of it now seems to be this... -- AnonMoos (talk) 21:19, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
 * No maps in Commons:Category:Greek-language maps showing history or other relevant Cats seem to be labelled in Ancient Greek. --T*U (talk) 12:42, 9 August 2022 (UTC)