"yes the king of the beavers / you cannot deceive us / and you can't fool owls"

[larryhammer]

So there's this the odd linguistic feature of English pronouns in compound subjects where they switch between nominative and objective forms depending on the order. That is, "Me and Julio were down by the schoolyard" sounds entirely correct even though technically it should be "I and Julio" -- which actually sounds so stiff it feels actively wrong -- but in the reverse form, it's "Julio and I were down by the schoolyard" that sounds correct ("Julio and me" sounds acceptable as a colloquialism but to be avoided when speaking in formal registers).

Does anyone know the name for this?

---L.

Subject quote from "Owls," Weebl.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I think that's part of how English verbal modes include strong distinctions between relative times of actions and continuing actions. (Compared to, say, Japanese, where it's hard to indicate what happens in "After we ate, I had cleaned the dishes, and was puttering in the kitchen" except as a simple sequence of events, without a lot of verbal gymnastics. Contrariwise, Japanese verbal modes make it easy to indicate how well one knows whether the action happened, which can take a string of auxiliaries in English.)

---L.

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

English verb tenses convey a lot of information both on relative times of actions and on intentionality. "I'm going to go to the store" implies that I have fixed plans to do so, while "I will go to the store" could refer to any time. It's one of the fussy features of the language and something I spend a whole lot of time on when I'm teaching it as English as a Foreign Language.

[larryhammer]

I surely believe that.

---L.