Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Seeing a lot of (technically grammatically incorrect!) phrasings like "between you and I", "for Sam and I" lately. One way to interpret: this is yet another way English-language culture is forgetting that it ever had anything to do with Latin. Same idea as https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1479817912106074119
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Expanding a bit: "traditionally", pronouns in English have two main cases (excluding possessive forms): nominative and accusative. Nominative is for the subject: *I* said that..., *He* built... Accusative is for the object: I saw *him*, He saw *me* And for pronouns: Bob came with *me*, Charlie greeted *her*...
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
This came from Latin, which had a much more complex and expansive system, which covered not just pronouns but also nouns. English dropped this for nouns, but kept it for pronouns.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
It's correct to say "Bob and I went to the store", instead of "Bob and me went to the store", because "Bob and I" is the subject - the thing performing the action. it's (traditionally) correct to say "Sam saw Bob and me", and not "Sam saw Bob and I", because "Bob and me" is the object - the thing being seen.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
But it seems like English speakers are not really instinctively capable of wrapping their head around the distinction, and I suspect it's the extreme unevenness of the case system in English, plus the fading influence of Latin (which teaches people that case systems are just and natural) that's causing this.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
(Clarification, thanks @bbjubjub.eth): this stuff comes to English from the Indo-European family in general, not necessarily *through* Latin (which is only one branch). I'd say Latin's influence in the last few centuries is primarily intellectual - though rapidly fading now.
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