A few days ago I found myself at lunch with an Englishman who informed me with horror that he had been to see the film Australia and had seen between you and me subtitled as entre tú y yo. He insisted that it should be entre ti y mí, these being the prepositional forms of the pronouns. I told him that entre tú y yo is how it is said in Spanish, and finally, after an appeal to a Spanish friend who was with us, he accepted that I must be right however ‘illogical’ this was in Spanish.
What is the situation? The Spanish version with two subject pronouns following entre is perfectly standard and correct; the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas states explicitly (entre 1.) that, although in the past the forms mí and ti were used with entre, ‘en el español actual se usan siempre las formas pronominales del sujeto yo, tú’ [In modern Spanish the subject pronoun forms yo, tú are always used]: Ahora mediaba algo entre yo y el mundo (Nasarre País [Esp. 1993]; Nada se interpone entre tú y la muerte (Leguina Nombre [Esp. 1993]) … Esta es la diferencia entre tú y yo (Somoza Caverna [Cuba 2000])
What about English? It is often said that the use of between you and I is an example of hypercorrection; people have been told so often not to say You and me were there that they say you and I when they shouldn’t do so. No doubt there is something in that but it can’t be the whole story. The OED says (I pers. pron. B2.):
2. Sometimes used for the objective after a verb or preposition, esp. when separated from the governing word by other words. This was very frequent in end [sic] of 16th and in 17th c., but is now considered ungrammatical.
The qualification that it makes (my emphasis) is interesting.
One quotation that it gives (1596) is from Shakespeare: All debts are clear’d betweene you and I, (The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, scene 2). It has another from 1698 but its quotations from 1866 and 1959 are critical of the usage.
If the usage was ‘very frequent’ 400 years ago, hypercorrection cannot really be the whole reason for its use nowadays.
As for It’s me, the OED only quotes examples in the sense of it suits me e.g. I like this dress, it’s me. Nevertheless, the use of it’s me to mean I am here, I am the person you can hear is so widespread as to be hard to criticise, as is the use of me in sentences such as He’s bigger than me. Randolph Quirk’s Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language gets round this problem by talking of ‘object territory’, meaning that the object is usually at the end of the sentence, so when a pronoun is in that position the tendency is to use the object form whatever the actual grammatical structure may be in classical terms.
In these cases Spanish has Soy yo (literally I am I) and Él es más grande que yo (than I with no alternative). In French, Louis XIV did not say L’état, c’est je; French has what they call the disjunctive pronoun so they can say C’est moi and Il est plus grand que moi. The German forms are Ich bin es (I am it) and Er ist gröβer als ich (again, than I with no alternative).
