Useless argument. WARNING: basic semantic theory inside (Recruitment)

by Funkmon , Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 16:20 (2575 days ago) @ Korny

Yeah, I won't say that Kermit is coming off as pretentious... but it does seem a bit prejudiced; being a native speaker does not grant you a superior and/or innate understanding of language.

Actually it does. It's built into the definition. A native English speaker has an intuitive understanding of English, learned it at a young age, speaks a dialect, and is productive.

You gave examples of poor writing from English speakers. You'll find that Claude and me is a perfectly fine usage, albeit an exception to the normal writing rule. Claude and I is nonstandard, and breaks the speaking rule of using me in a plural verb.

Me is actually all right to use in an impersonal verb, like methinks, or as a verb ellipsis, like saying "me too," in other words, "me can ___ too."

"Me and myn ayres..haue releissit..al my rycht clayme persuit chalenge or askyng..to fourty markis worth of land." This is from the Douglas book, in 1885. Jane Austen used this form. Everybody uses this form.

This, like the impersonal verb and verb ellipsis, is just another exception in the pronoun usage where it's used in a plural verb form. This is well known, well documented, and a common feature of all major forms of English.

This is a product of fairly recent efforts to standardize English, and usually identifiable as one man's idea. The split infinitive Cody came up with is anonymous, but if I recall correctly, this specific issue of a plural verb me came up with Robert Lowth, a poet who was interested in applying Latin grammar rules to English, which he knew was an issue, but it resulted in nice poetic sentences using emulations of the oblique case and stuff. His book on the subject, not written for English learners, but those interested in grammar analysis, was adapted as a style guide, and so some of this became entrenched in writing, but not in speaking.

The difference in writing and speaking what are supposed to be the same language is called diglossia. Any foreign speaker can write in English fairly, well, but there is an intuition about actual rules of the language, as opposed to split infinitives and the non-standard use of I in plural verb form construction built into native speakers. Non native speakers don't have it, by definition.