"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
> If the old nominative forms had become cliticized, then surely there'd be a
> great reluctance ever to have evolved things like: 'He gave Charlie & I
> some donuts'.

I've never heard a construction like that around here.  I've heard,
occasionally, "between you and I".  I'm not saying that it *has* become
clitic, only that, at least in my dialect, it seems to be going in that
direction.

> There is also a marked tendency in modern spoken English this side of the
> pond, at least, to use nominative forms before relative pronouns, e.g. 'It
> turned out all right for we who waited there'.  Surely, if 'I' were clitic,
> this would militate against such "ungrammatical" tendencies?

Hmm, interesting, I don't think I've heard that form before.  I'd
definitely say "... for us who waited", indeed, "we who", "he who",
etc., feels odd, even when, gramatically, a subject pronoun is called
for.  Generally, in my speach, "I" only sounds natural when immediately
before a verb phrase, including adverbs, but not including "and"-type
constructions, so "I often go", but not "I and John often go".

Clitic is, perhaps, the wrong word.  However, "I"-type forms do have a
very restricted usage.  "Between you and I" sounds wrong in my idiolect,
tho it appears that some other people use it, not as a hypercorrection,
but as a normal form, even when they're not trying to sound "proper".
So, the usage is obviously different for them.

> And the endless debates about "It's I" and "It's me" would not occur - but
> they do.

Right - "It's me" is the normal, colloquial form, while "It's I" is the
prescriptivist's form, which is ignored by just about everyone.  :-)

> Not at all.  In the dialect I grew up with final -s is used for all
> persons, both singular & plural, in the simple present tense.   This is
> very common in southern English dialects (I grew up in West Sussex) and is
> still very much alive in the English of the coastal plain of south east
> Wales.

Cool, I've heard of that phenomenon.  Quite a bit more logical than the
-s ending, actually, IMHO, since it makes the -s into a useful
distinction.

> The modern prescriptivist "It is I" is a muddled hypercorrection.

I don't see how it's a "hypercorrection".  Hypercorrection usually
refers to trying to meet a prescriptivist form and overshooting.

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