Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 January 15

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 15

Pedantic correctness vs. commonsense phraseology

The following is an amended excerpt from an actual exchange on a user's talk page, about the editing of a certain article:

• It's clearly incorrect to me (who knows quite a bit about Mongolian tiddlywinks), but I can understand where you're coming from.

Now, a pedant might require that the highlighted word "knows" be instead "know", as it's a first-person reference. Hence:

• It's clearly incorrect to me (who know quite a bit about Mongolian tiddlywinks …,

but that sounds, well, jarringly wrong.

I know one could rephrase the sentence to remove this issue, but I want to know whether the sentence as it stands is one of those occasions where a judicious overlooking of the rules would be justified as being in the best interests of all concerned.

Do we have an article on the tension between pedantic correctness and commonsense phraseology?

Another case is: "Who's there?" – "It's me" (rather than "It's I").

Thanks. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:12, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

You might stumble upon an appropriate term in: linguistic prescription, linguistic description, linguistic purism (24 varieties), or linguistic purism in English. Would Prestige (sociolinguistics) apply to colloquialism?—eric 00:50, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

JackofOz -- in a Latin relative clause of this type, a 1st person singular verb would be used, but the tendency in English in recent centuries is to default to third person verbs, except sometimes when the verb is "to be". (But this doesn't have much to do with "It's I"/"it's me"...) AnonMoos (talk) 02:03, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Jack, my intuition is different from yours, so I can't really relate to the question. To me, "know" sounds much more natural. Any pedantry is just a side benefit, and wouldn't have occurred to me if you hadn't reported your own intuition. --Trovatore (talk) 02:45, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Surely it’s “I who know” and “me who knows.” If someone said “me who know” I would be waiting for them to remove their human costume. Temerarius (talk) 11:08, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Or maybe their Tonto costume. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:51, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

How do you figure that, Temerarius? When a speaker refers to himself, regardless whether in nominative or objective case, it's the first person. No? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:32, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Are you familiar with the idiom "methinks"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:25, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Methinks ("it seems to me", not "I think") is not related to the current discussion. There, the me is not a subject; it's a relic of the dative case. Deor (talk) 21:50, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Me thinks, therefore me is. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:24, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

On "the rules" (mentioned and seemingly assumed in the opening question): The speaker of English who has at least some metalinguistic knowledge will say that verbs (other than modals) in the simple present tense necessarily take an "(e)s" inflection to agree with a subject that's both 3rd-person and singular, and otherwise may not do so. End of story. Except that it isn't. One exception comes with what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language terms "3rd person override in cleft relatives" (p507): "It is I who am at fault", yes; but "It is me who is at fault". And sure enough, the iWeb corpus has plenty of tokens of "it's me who's" (NB searches for this require added spaces, "it 's me who 's"). Back to the question: "I want to know whether the sentence as it stands is one of those occasions where a judicious overlooking of the rules would be justified as being in the best interests of all concerned." If "the rules" fit neither L1 speaker intuitions nor evidence from corpora, then there's something inadequate about (or plain wrong in) the rules or their application. And when you're mystified by this kind of thing, don't fall back on what you remember from some grade-school or similar grammar: consult a good grammar or a relevant corpus or both. -- Hoary (talk) 22:58, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

In Otto Jespersen's A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles: Part VII: Syntax section 4.5₅, he points out that the KJV of Psalm 77:14 is "Thou art the God that doest wonders" (second-person verb inflection), while the Anglican Prayer Book translation (not exactly the same) has "Thou art the God that doeth wonders" (third-person verb inflection), so apparently vacillation about this goes way back. In A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles: Part III: Syntax. Second Volume section 4.6₃, he gives some more recent third-person verb examples, such as: George Bernard Shaw "Is it you thats going to be married or is it Edith?" (apostrophe omission intentional), or J.M. Barrie "It is myself who is writing at last" etc. I'm not sure that this was ever a big prescriptivist bugaboo (if it was, Jespersen doesn't mention it)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:34, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Why would it be "know"? The verb there has to agree with the pronoun "who", not the pronoun "me". --Khajidha (talk) 12:34, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Note that the counter example given above ("It is I who know") is a continuous phrase, not a parenthetical as in the original sentence. --Khajidha (talk) 13:10, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm assuming you're referring to "...incorrect to me (who know quite a bit ...". What is the number of the pronoun "who"? It depends on the subject, and the subject here is "me", the objective case of "I". We say "I know", not "I knows". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:19, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

This is admittedly not a rigorous argument, but I see the problem as stemming from the objective case "me", which casts the relative clause in the objective case. Therefore, the clause is effectively in the third person and the verb is properly "knows". The sentence can be read as "to me ([someone] who knows....)". This was alluded to above by Hoary. Jmar67 (talk) 23:58, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

"Therefore, the clause is effectively in the third person" - can you explain why you think that? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:20, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Because it is also in the objective case and therefore refers to the speaker objectively, in the third person. Jmar67 (talk) 00:29, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Not convinced. "He attacked me". "He" is 3rd person. But what is "me"? On reflection, I think that person applies to the grammatical subject, and not to any object. This is backed up by the table in Grammatical person, which lists nominative-case personal pronouns, but there's no mention of any objective-case forms such as "me", "him" or "them". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:31, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

The "I" is irrelevant. At no point does the dentence say anything like "I know" or "I knows", it says "who knows". Who is 3rd person. Knows is 3rd person. --Khajidha (talk) 23:54, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Jack of Oz -- in the non-English languages likely to be familiar to English-speakers, verb person agreement applies only to subjects, but non-subject personal pronouns are also considered to have person. In a language such as Latin, a sentence like Amica me repudiavit, qui misellus sum (maybe not stylistically the greatest, but basically grammatical) "My girlfriend broke up with me, who am a miserable wretch", would have the verb in its second clause inflected as 1st person singular (following from the non-subject pronoun in the first clause), and anything else would be a strange error. In modern English, verb person inflections are somewhat rudimentary (since the loss of "thou" around 1700, most verbs distinguish inflectionally only the present-tense 3rd person singular, while modal verbs don't even do that), and because in most relative clauses the person or thing relativized is third-person, there has been a certain "attraction" of relative clauses with subjects of other persons to the third-person... AnonMoos (talk) 20:37, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

That makes sense. But this is English we're talking about, so what's the relevance of whatever goes on in other languages? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:06, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

To me, it seems exceedingly likely that what happens in Latin happens in the vast majority of languages which have verb inflections which distinguish between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, probably including English or the predecessors of English, if you go far back enough (notice that already in Anglo-Frisian or "Ingvaeonic", plural verbs no longer distinguished between persons). The "attraction" to third person (somewhat illogical, as cases of linguistic attraction usually are) is likely to due to the relatively impoverished system of verb inflection in modern English. AnonMoos (talk) 01:26, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Similarly, German repeats the nominative pronoun "ich" ("I") or "du"/"Sie" ("you") to preserve the grammatical first or second person in the relative clause. Jmar67 (talk) 01:53, 20 January 2020 (UTC)