|
(3) Johnson | For Whom, the Bell Tolls; In the court of common usage, an old pronoun is losing its case.
https://www.economist.com/news/b ... oun-losing-its-case
Quote:
"LAST week The Economist considered the new South African president's in-tray [the other is 'out-tray' -- both stacked on his desk], advertising our advice on the cover with the words 'Who Cyril Ramaphosa should fire.' * * * Shouldn't that be 'Whom Cyril Ramaphosa should fire'? [yes, grammatically.] It wasn't a cock-up."
"Whom is one of the few remaining vestiges of case in English. At the time of 'Beowulf,' the great monster-slaying Anglo-Saxon epic, English nouns, pronouns and adjectives, plus words like the, all had an ending showing case. Four different cases in Old English tell you whether a word is a subject, direct object, indirect object or possessor. Other languages, from Ancient Greek to Russian to Estonian, have far richer case systems still.
"More than 1,000 years later, that system has vanished almost entirely—probably fatally weakened by foreign invaders. When foreign speakers learn a second language, as the Vikings and then the Normans did when they conquered England, cases are tricky to pick up * * * Those Vikings and Normans feebly learning Old English helped turn it into Middle English, in which case was far less often visible.
"Yet fans of whom might ask, how can you dispense with case without throwing out intelligibility? * * * That is true—so true that every language on Earth has a way of solving the problem, whether it has cases or not. In English and other case-poor languages, from Swedish to Vietnamese [Chinese has no case], the solution is word order.
"In Old English, Latin or Russian subjects, objects and other words can appear in different orders; this gives speakers and writers a way to play with rhythm and emphasis. The loss of case in modern English means that word order must be relatively fixed, usually subject, verb and object in that sequence. Steve loves Sally means that Steve is the lover, Sally the loved. This could be reversed in Old English, with the meaning unchanged, because the case-endings would show who loved whom. In English today just six words still show a distinction between subject and object [pay attention to 'between subject and object' -- many words in Modern English has cases; eg, you.your, student/students, see/saw/seen, fiance/fiancee]: I, he, she, we, they and who.
"Whom is special. It is used in questions and relative clauses * * * It is not always obvious whether the relevant word is a subject or an object, as in sentences such as, 'He's the candidate who(m) we think will win.' (It should be who.) * * * Whom is stuffier in some places than in others. The pomposity of Sideshow Bob from 'The Simpsons' is clear when he asks his audience 'Whoooom do you love?' * * * After a preposition, whom still feels necessary: 'people for whom a holiday is a far-off dream.'
Note:
(a) The "whom" (in the title) and "case" (in the subtitle) are both puns. In this essay, The bell tolls for "whom" which is gradually losing its case (people tends to use "who" except after a preposition).
"For Whom the Bell Tolls [without the comma] is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940." en.wikipedia.org
(b) a cock-up: "a blunder; a confused situation"
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cock-up.html
The www.oxforddictionaries.com comments about this word: "British informal."
(c) "At the time of 'Beowulf,' the great monster-slaying Anglo-Saxon epic, English nouns, pronouns and adjectives, plus words like the, all had an ending showing case."
(i) Beowulf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf
(ii) "all had an ending showing [grammatical] case"
(A) In grammar, the ending is called "inflection."
(B) inflection (n):
"1 : the act or result of curving or bending : BEND
2 : change in pitch or loudness of the voice
3 a : the change of form that words undergo to mark such distinctions as those of case, gender, number, tense, person, mood, or voice
b : a form, suffix, or element involved in such variation"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflection
(C) inflect (vt & vi; from Latin inflectere, from in- + flectere to bend)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflect
|
发表于 3-8-2018 09:55:45
收藏
分享
支持
反对
楼主