Wait, this is a thing in Esperanto? That wasn’t a performance error on Emile’s part, but they actually use accusative case predicatively like Slavic languages do instrumental case? That would be pretty bizarre.
It’s a performance error; the predicate should be nominative.
English pronoun cases don’t divide up the same way Esperanto cases do (e.g., prepositions take the object case), but note that many English speakers say, “It is me” rather than “It is I”. (I don’t know Emile’s first language.)
Also, leaving off the accusative ending is such a pitfall for most beginners at Esperanto that people sometimes overcorrect anything matching the pattern “nominativeverbnominative” to “nominativeverbaccusative”.
Edit: Corrected “pronouns take” to “prepositions take”.
English pronoun cases don’t divide up the same way Esperanto cases do (e.g., prepositions take the object case), but note that many English speakers say, “It is me” rather than “It is I”. (I don’t know Emile’s first language.)
Right. I forget the technical terms used in the case of English (they aren’t usually called nominative vs. accusative anymore), but the default case is ‘me’: ‘I’ is the special case, used only in subject position.
(The default case in English is actually descended from the Old English dative, not the accusative, with the exception of ‘it’ (OE nom. ‘hit’, acc. ‘hit’, dat. and gen. ‘him’ and ‘his’ just like the masculine pronoun) though the two merged for most of the pronouns in the OE period: it’s only obvious from ‘him’ (OE nom. ‘he’, acc. ‘hine’, dat. ‘him’) and the pronoun ‘they’, which was borrowed from Old Norse (nom. ‘þeir’, acc. ‘þá’, dat. ‘þeim’).)
French, and despite liking learning languages, I’m not that good at reasoning abstractly about grammatical rules; “accusative” and “nominative” are not very salient concepts in my mind, and I have to look them up to be sure of what they mean exactly.
I am lucky in that reasoning abstractly about grammatical rules is a good fit for the way my mind works; even so, I only got good at it after I learned a second language.
It’s kind of Slavic-like construction.
Wait, this is a thing in Esperanto? That wasn’t a performance error on Emile’s part, but they actually use accusative case predicatively like Slavic languages do instrumental case? That would be pretty bizarre.
It’s a performance error; the predicate should be nominative.
English pronoun cases don’t divide up the same way Esperanto cases do (e.g., prepositions take the object case), but note that many English speakers say, “It is me” rather than “It is I”. (I don’t know Emile’s first language.)
Also, leaving off the accusative ending is such a pitfall for most beginners at Esperanto that people sometimes overcorrect anything matching the pattern “nominative verb nominative” to “nominative verb accusative”.
Edit: Corrected “pronouns take” to “prepositions take”.
Right. I forget the technical terms used in the case of English (they aren’t usually called nominative vs. accusative anymore), but the default case is ‘me’: ‘I’ is the special case, used only in subject position.
(The default case in English is actually descended from the Old English dative, not the accusative, with the exception of ‘it’ (OE nom. ‘hit’, acc. ‘hit’, dat. and gen. ‘him’ and ‘his’ just like the masculine pronoun) though the two merged for most of the pronouns in the OE period: it’s only obvious from ‘him’ (OE nom. ‘he’, acc. ‘hine’, dat. ‘him’) and the pronoun ‘they’, which was borrowed from Old Norse (nom. ‘þeir’, acc. ‘þá’, dat. ‘þeim’).)
French, and despite liking learning languages, I’m not that good at reasoning abstractly about grammatical rules; “accusative” and “nominative” are not very salient concepts in my mind, and I have to look them up to be sure of what they mean exactly.
I am lucky in that reasoning abstractly about grammatical rules is a good fit for the way my mind works; even so, I only got good at it after I learned a second language.
Makes sense, thanks for providing the explanation I didn’t think of!