Real Grammar returns to a question of correctness that I raised here: is it correct to say between you and I?
It is true indeed that English inflections have weakened over the centuries to the extent that many people fail to respect them. The problem with the idea of correctness is that standard English is itself a matter of informal convention; there being no single recognised authority there can be no objective standard. So, while matters such as this are of small importance in the great scheme of the language, it is important for teachers (and authors of usage guides) to know what is going on and advise students and readers of the likely consequences of using what is regarded as non-standard usage. In A Guide to English Language Usage I conclude the article on split infinitives, which presents some occasions when splitting an infinitive is clearly justified, by saying
… it must be said that there is still, rightly or wrongly, a considerable feeling among English speakers that a split infinitive is wrong. Sometimes it seems natural to do so but a decision to split an infinitive deliberately should never be taken lightly.
The reviewer in Modern English Teacher described this as ‘a sensible conclusion.’ I wonder whether he noticed that in writing those words I deliberately did not say a decision to deliberately split an infinitive.
But to return to the internal logic of language, the fact is that that is the only kind that there is or can be. A language obeys its own internal rules, and these rules can only be determined by descriptive analysis. When I was at school, my physics master talked disparagingly of ‘the airy-fairy world of mathematics’, where you solved an apparent illogicality (the square root of minus 1 for example) simply by giving it as name and incorporating it into your system. Linguistics follows the same pattern.
One illogicality of English that has always puzzled me but that does not seem to have attracted the attention of pedants is the use of an indirect object as the object of a passive voice verb form:
He was given a gold watch
Should it not, one might ask, be
Him was given a gold watch
thereby recognising the dative case of the indirect object? Well no, it shouldn’t. There is the case of if you please, which certainly seems to be a dative form. The OED has the following under please:
6.a intr. To be pleased, to like; to have the will or desire; to have the humour; to think proper.
The history of this inverted use of please (observed first in Scottish writers) is obscure. But exactly the same change took place in the 14th c. in the use of the synonymous verb like, where the impersonal ‘it liked him’, ‘him liked’, became ‘he liked’ c 1430. It may therefore be assumed that ‘I please’ was similarly substituted for ‘it pleases me’, ‘me pleases’
6.b if (†and, an) you please: if it please you, if you like, if it is your will or pleasure: a courteous qualification to a request, the acceptance of an offer, etc.; also (parenthetically), a sarcastic way of emphasizing any surprising statement, as if asking leave to make it. (So F. s’il vous plaît. Cf. by your leave: see leave n.1 1.)
Here you may have been originally dative, as in 3 b (i.e. if (it) please you, = L. si vobis placet, F. s’il vous plaît, Ger. wenn es Ihnen gefällt), as in quot. 1483 in 2; but it is now taken as nominative (i.e. if you are pleased, if you like, if it is your will or pleasure): cf. if he pleases; if they please, above (in 6); and ‘if ye please’ here in 1530. Shakespeare has both if you be pleased (4 b), and if you please.
Certainly this use of if you please in Lady and the Tramp
We are Siamese if you please
We are Siamese if you don’t please
shows that the meaning of please with a direct object is not the case here.
So, the language works that way because that’s the way it works. And if any logician objects that that is a circular argument, the answer is simple. Yes it is. I know. And the fact doesn’t worry me in the slightest.
English is not alone in such peculiarity. Spanish has one phenomenon that is outrageously illogical. Hasta is the preposition until. Hasta jueves means until Thursday and hasta pronto is an informal way of leave-taking, like see you soon. But when hasta is used as a conjunction it often, though not necessarily, has an apparently negative form: hasta que no venga means until he comes. Wikilengua (Spanish) has references to the finest Spanish language references justifying it, and explains that in some languages, Hebrew for example, the words for until and while are confused. It mentions that Spanish hasta comes from Arabic hatta, a point on which I am not qualified to make any useful comment.
I have mentioned other examples of apparent illogicality in Spanish here.
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