Good evening, fatster, and you’ve outdone yourself today with all the international stuff in particular.

Thanks especially for the bit about “Baghdad Bob” being right after all; it’s one of the better 10th anniversary pieces I’ve seen.

As to ” Action Alert: We Have 1 Week Or Less to … ,” unless I’m missing something I’m afraid that ship has sailed. The Tester Amendment cited in your link posted two days ago was the subject of wendydavis’s diary of the day before. In spite of whatever communications to the Senate that that post may have generated, the amendment was stripped under pressure from Harry Reid about the time your link was posted.

As to the bell tolling for “whom,” that one doesn’t bother me too much, but although I keep telling myself that language is a dynamic phenomenon it drives me up the wall when object pronouns are used as subjects; “me and my girlfriend did such and such …”

People may have seen some hardy souls all bundled up (it’s been cold) lining up in front of the Supreme Court on TV this afternoon (it was big on CNN). They’re saving places in line to get in for the oral arguments on Equality of Marriage on Monday (not for themselves, most likely; there’s an underground industry in DC of itinerants selling their bodies to people who are too important to stand in such lines themselves). I can attest that the images were not faked: I walked by there about 3 PM on my way home from the Library of Congress, just when some TV equipment was being packed up.

See, when you live in Washington you get to be a witness to all kinds of history.

Hello, E. F. Beall. At least the homeless in Washington, DC are able to pick up a few more pieces of spare change while waiting for history to roll on, or over them.

The one that drives me up the wall the farthest is use of ‘I’, ‘he’ or ‘she’ after a preposition–as in , “Between you and I . . . ” Arrrrrgh.

Regarding Netanyahu’s apology. . .

It’s time, since IDF has other “better” ways to stop boats now, will do so unseen, won’t need to board any, etc. Before now, during the past three year interim, I’d bet they’d have done it all over again the same way or nearly so. Piracy-lite perhaps. Just a reckless hunch.

That may be the only reason for fence mending now, other than that the urgency is suddenly shared by both countries. Absent Syria none of this might be happening. Israel and Turkey are not friends, regardless.

Such a mess, maa8722. And the one in Syria is, and certainly will be, causing lots of “adjustments”. Sigh.

Aloha, fatster…! Speaking of Syria, I just posted a new myFDL… WMDs And The Free Syria Act of 2013

Aloha back to you, CTuttle. Thanks for letting us now about your new post. Sounds most interesting.

The Israelis aren’t buying Obummer’s Snake Oil…

Fatster, as a language English is shedding its inflected habits whenever the meaning can remain quite clear in context. The erosion continues, and “whom” will be a goner in another generation. Also adverbs will be supplanted by adjectives whenever possible, and there will be no more subjunctive. The symptoms of demise are heard often already.

The correct conventions have to serve a purpose in clarity of meaning, not simply arbitrary grammar. I have a lot of trouble with this, myself, and am often sloppy, but it seems inevitable. I can still speak “proper” English when I have to and when my guard is up. Sometimes I avoid doing so.

It gets more serious.

French has long accepted “C’est moi” for “It’s me” or “It is I” depending on what sort of offense one wants to commit in English. It could be a social offense or a grammatical one as we choose.

Same for German, where there is one “Ich bin gut” for “I’m good” or “I’m well.” Same problem, same possible offense in English. It is not possible to be good and well at the same time?

I know what you mean, maa8722. And what about ‘feel’?

12 transitive verbs, take adjectives not adverbs. Feel, be, become, remain, seem smell sound stand taste. Can’t remember other 3.

Dayam, I’m impressed with Chris Hayes Friday nite debut…! Following on Rachel’s re-airing of hubris…! Must-see…! ;-)

And congrats, fatster on your primetime frontpaging…! ;-)

I thank you for the link about the death of ‘whom.’ This is something that does confuse my ESL students, who are sometimes taught (to them) confusing rules for pronouns only to find that Americans substitute ‘who’ for ‘whom’ all the time. I try to explain that languages change and that this pronoun change is a great example, but in the future I may have them read this Atlantic article to illustrate the point.

:)

Thank you, EvilDrPuma.

Whom, in other words, is doomed… *heh* The death knell has tolled for ye…! ;-)

I like your analysis, maa8722, and add that loss of inflection has been a characteristic of the development of Indo-European languages throughout their history insofar as one can tell. Thus nouns in ancient Greek have five cases, but in Homer there are still a few examples of a sixth (the instrumental) left over from Mycenaean times, whereas modern Greek has lost the dative.

But why can’t we lose me, her, him and us rather than I, he, she, and we?

But why can’t we lose me, her, him and us rather than I, he, she, and we?

Because there has to be a difference between a giver of action and a receiver of action for any verb of any transitive state.

Also:

…modern Greek has lost the dative.

That is because the genitive can “swallow” the dative function. Many inflected languages have done that.

You can have my whom when you pry it from my cold, dead hands! [crowd cheers fanatically]

A matter of time I’d bet.

I’m almost 66. When I was a kid Protestants were still dabbling in Latin. I recall reading “Winnie the Pooh” in Latin, and finally I understood that the annoying proliferation of cases was due to the verb being imprisoned nearly inflexibly at the end of every sentence.

In English we can move the verb almost at will as a “fence” where we want, and that helps sort things out without cases. It wasn’t always so. We should be thankful. Getting away from cases was long and arduous. There’s a great book about those roots and how they changed over time

Old English and Its Closest Relatives

http://books.google.com/books/about/Old_English_and_Its_Closest_Relatives.html?id=xAeJoF55hhsC

Baghdad Bob: I remember my amazement at the spectacle of a nation totally in the thrall of the most transparent lies (that’s the U.S. in case it isn’t clear), mocking this functionary for his irrelevant obfuscations. The U.S. had more guns, so it got to declare its own lies were the truth.

Did any of you Boston – East Coasters see the meteor?

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/22/meteor-streaks-through-sky-over-boston/

I wonder what Tehran Teresa might have to say…? 8-(

…finally I understood that the annoying proliferation of cases was due to the verb being imprisoned nearly inflexibly at the end of every sentence.

Sorry, but that isn’t quite right, as Latin is not word-order dependent at all. I can think of many examples from the classics right off the top of my head:

“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” All of Gaul is divided into three parts.

Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae.

Of these, the strongest is Belgium”

And so forth…

Well, it was a long time ago. Thanks for correcting me. I’ll have to fetch “Winnie” and see why I recalled it that way.

didnt see it myself, as I’m no east coaster, but as far as I can gather from filtering thru the twitter-twatting, this is the best video yet:
video #1
video #2

The Rengan and Raj Rajaratnam convictions, like that of Bernie Madoff, are like Aztec sacrifices, intended as an offering to preserve the existing order. Although their perpetrators are very wealthy, these are basically middle-level crimes, orders of magnitude smaller than the really big criminal activity at the apex of world finance. By making a show of these convictions, the U.S. Department of Justice can pretend to themselves and try to fool everyone else that they are vigorously prosecuting the roots of financial fraud when they are really doing nothing of the sort. (The movie Syriana, directed by George Clooney, had a good depiction of the Aztec nature of these sacrificial offerings of selected members of the establishment.)

Thnx so much, shebs! Very showy streaking across the sky there. Wow!

Kinda makes you wish dashcams were as ubiquitous here as they are in Russia…
Then again, I’m sorta glad we don’t need them like they do.

My feeling exactly. Plus there is the added benefit that the brothers Raj are dusky of hue & furrrrin & who knows? mebbe terrissss. The Raj bros are of the club but not in the club. Perfect sacrificial lambs or Aztec sacrifices if you will. Chumps & chump change. Booyah.

JPMC board to shareholders: You and what army?

The board of directors of JPMorgan Chase & Co said on Friday it “strongly endorses” keeping Jamie Dimon as both their chairman and chief executive of the company.

I’m outraged by this act (video) that apparently is otherwise a fourth-degree felony in New Mexico. What happens when this make-believe cowboy acts out around other human beings? Can he distinguish other living beings or does he just see things to control and take for his profit?

Meanwhile, I am for protection of all wild horses and buffalo that continue to be taken from public lands for private profit because Congress would rather get kickbacks for the rape and pillage of our lands and peoples.

He really gave it to she and I.

That sentence is grammatically incorrect and, to fans of grammar, perhaps even jarring.

However, despite the nominative case being used throughout the sentence, we know that “he” is the actor and “she and I” are the receivers of . We know that in English because of “to” and because of word order.

In Latin, the only way to know would have been use of the nominative case and the objective case, but we are not speaking or writing in Latin.

OMG, Iran “threatened” to retaliate if attacked!
What nation wouldn’t retaliate if attacked?

On second thought, the rest of the nations in the Middle East would, if attacked, probably expect the U.S. to retaliate. Kuwait certainly did when Saddam threatened it– after Glaspie told him that his border disputes were no concern of the United States–and we certainly did not disappoint Kuwait.

As far as Clinton urging two candidates to run, promising that he would help both, because he never expected both of them to take him at his word, Bill remains the combination of very smart and very sleazy that he was while President.

Good morning, ncbb, if you’re still there; it’s a pleasure to have you weigh in on this topic.

It was precisely my point @ 15 that, while “he really gave it to she and I” is just as ungrammatical as “me and my girlfriend checked out the hotties at the mall,” I greatly prefer the former.

But after re-reading fatster’s comment @ 2, it seems he has the opposite opinion. I guess the further decline of inflection in pronouns (for their part nouns already lost it somewhere back in Middle or Old English, maybe maa8722 can tell us where) is just plain going to bother one set of we/us old fogies or another.

I did some more sleuthing this morning. The subject of Latin word order turns out to be a thicket.

“Latin allows a very flexible word order because of its inflectional syntax.”

OTH

“Ordinary prose tended to follow the pattern of Subject, Indirect Object, Direct Object, Adverbial Words or Phrases, Verb (SIDAV). Any extra, though subordinate verbs, are placed before the main verb; for example infinitives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_grammar

So that second quote above is how I was consistently taught in grade school, verb at the end, even though anything goes, as you point out.

There is another, more in depth discussion at page 5 and onward in

http://books.google.com/books/about/Latin_Word_Order_Structured_Meaning_and.html?id=WY2Nhc3HY3sC

That points out there is so much we don’t know about Latin since there are no native speakers anymore. Guesswork abounds and we rely on too “helpful” copyists from generations ago who wanted to make out task “easier”

Also, on another topic, I recall from a couple of weeks ago you mentioned having been one of De Groote’s piano students many years ago in AZ.

The Cliburn Foundation released the list of 30 competitors, bios, and repertoire for the upcoming piano competition. It begins May 24th, and I understand there will be live streaming. Each competitor has tabs for further background info.

http://cliburn.org/cliburn-competition/current-competitors/

I’m attending at least the preliminaries and probably the semi finals as well. It will be all the piano I need hear for yet another four year cycle.

Psssst. I am a female. :)

The following generations won’t mind, though, as long they can maintain the subtleties of meaning in other ways. If not, chaos will follow.

If you want the history of the cracks in the grammar developing, it would begin in my link in #18 above. It’s 290 pages though. And it’s only a primer for non-linguists!

You think he let ‘em kiss his cufflinks?

Thnx, allan.

Mea culpa, fatster; I don’t know where I got the other idea.

No prob, E. F. Beall. No worries. It tickled me, actually.

(Perhaps I should have said, “I is a her.”)

Actually one does not have to go that far to get the main points: It seems that even Middle English had three case endings for so-called strong nouns: nominative/accusative, genitive and dative. (Strong nouns are those that add s to form the plural in Modern English.) It only dropped the distinction between nominative and accusative that had pertained in Old English for feminine nouns in the process of losing the gender.

So it is only after Chaucer and Piers Plowman that we get the modern caseless noun. I’m a bit surprised.

“I is a her.” LOL. This subject has been a lot of fun, hasn’t it?

Re: #42

It’s a fascinating journey, but I’m only up to ninth century English at the moment, or thereabouts. I doubt I’ll ever finish reading about it — so little time. If I do it would be nice to look into how the Romance languages diverged from Latin and each other. Next project, after reincarnation.

Thank you for the video of George.

I agree that the history of the Romance languages is totally fascinating, maa8722. This is especially so if you include the ones that have not achieved state power, like Catalán (although it may be coming there) and the one in southern France that scholars call Occitan but everyone else calls Provençal, where the Troubadours created the RLs’ first great literature. (I know a little about that because I once studied the history of birds in Western poetry.) Good luck with it after your reincarnation (if you really have to wait that long).

You bet, joeblue! Who’s on the tambourine? (It ahouldn’t be, but almost looks like HST.)

Thanks for the encouragement. Maybe this sub thread is getting a bit long, but. . .

Awhile ago I had searched into

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

And found scrolling way near the end of that,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romance-lg-classification-en.png

And quite a few of those colors have further explanations of their own. I can’t recall any effort I’ve seen before in Wiki which exceeds this. What a joy!

I was trying to figure that out. Could be Hunter that rascal.

I’ll try and dig around a bit about this. Glad you agree-I was gettin’ lonesome. Surely we aren’t the only two people who noticed.

See “Comments” from here. They’re saying it’s Ray Cooper.

We were wrong, but here’s a consolation prize for you (though from a very sad moment).

thanks for the george harrison music.

You bet, mafr, and . . . Good Morning!