Talk:me

Translations

I suggest treating the translations of "me" as I have done here for French and Italian where there are multiple senses and grammatical nuances. -- Paul G 13:25, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Possessive determiner

This usage is not restricted to Geordie, and is already listed as sense 7 of the personal pronoun section. --Ptcamn 05:42, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Missed that one! No worries, cheers.--Williamsayers79 09:44, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Shouldn't this be under a new section of possessive pronoun (working different in a sentence than a pronoun)? 92.20.198.45 19:17, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

МНЕ

Russian for me is mne, why should it be checked? not in all cases it's mne though. Mallerd 18:51, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

8

Does the eighth English definition belong? It's grammatically incorrect. — This comment was unsigned.

• Yes - we record actual usage, not what is "correct". SemperBlotto 21:33, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Usage note requires clarification, citations &/or more examples

...However, “accusative” pronouns are widely used as the subject of verbs in colloquial speech if they are accompanied by and: Me and her are friends. 

The note should really substantiate its claim that " “accusative” pronouns are widely used as the subject of verbs in colloquial speech if they are accompanied by and" with external citations using accusative pronouns other than the one in question. (Also, why the quote marks around accusative?)

Also, regarding the Usage note's last item:

Using me as the lone subject (without and) of a verb is a feature of various types of pidgin English

This needs examples of the usage that the writer is trying to describe. "Me want"? "Me like"? And if so, it may also be worth mentioning that this type of construction is also typical in the speech of infant English-learners. Also, are we suggesting that "me and her likee" is correct? This really needs to be clarified.

--TyrS 04:00, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Albanian Infinitive

The word "me" (IPA /mε/) is used in Northern Albanian before a participle to make an infinitive, much like the English word "to". e.g. me kênë = to be, me shkue = to go etc. Shouldn't this definition be included here? — This unsigned comment was added by 2601:406:8000:1d00:3117:c467:d7f0:6772 (talk) at 14:24, 7 February 2022 (UTC).

“<noun> me”

Informally, something like “chip me” means “give me a chip.” See Urban Dictionary’s “Chip Me!”. (Just be cautious scrolling down, because… it’s Urban Dictionary.) There are several more examples as well, including different items, although it’s usually food.

How would I note this? It’s not a noun, verb, or adjective. It doesn’t work without the object. There are pages like bite someone’s head off that don’t specify an object, but that’s actually a full phrase rather than a simple word. Gabldotink (talk) 04:38, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

EN: one-word response to question, "Me!"

Which part of speech and sense covers the following?

Manager: Who would like to volunteer to run the workshop?

Employee: Me! I'll do it.

I can't reconcile it to the existing pronoun senses. (I may be missing something.) It seems special because the answer to the question seems like it should be a grammatical subject (not object). However, this doesn't fit as merely nonstandard/colloquial/sometimes-proscribed usage of me where more formally I would be used, because in reality practically nobody would respond, *"I! I'll do it." — or, even less likely, just , "I!". (I am not including instances of hesitation, as in "I... um, I can ..., I mean, I'll do it.")

If it's a noun, then something is missing at us to cover the analogous:

Scout leader: Who's going to go and fetch water from the creek?

Scout (standing with two friends): Us! We'll do it. Jimmy and Terry can each carry 15 L, and I'll carry 10 L.

Or can it just be an interjection?? —DIV (1.145.112.83 06:51, 19 April 2024 (UTC))

Just the normal pronoun. Pedantically perhaps one should answer "I!" and not "me!", but that distinction is largely lost in many English sentences. (The Phantom of the Opera may announce "it is I!" but even a grammar nerd Fox Mulder will probably pick up the phone and say "it's me".) Equinox ◑ 18:54, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Other pronouns do this too, don't they—isn't "Who did this?" "Him. He did it." the same thing? We should probably update Appendix:English grammar and use it more, for explaining all the things like this that people want explained somewhere, but which don't necessarily belong in individual entries. Like this, the -k- in to traffic → trafficked, the thing where people use 'wrong' verb forms (for any and all verbs) in certain dialects or other situations ("I hates the nasty eagle", "yesterday, he hate that, today he love it", "yesterday I go there" instead of "went"), etc... - -sche (discuss) 18:50, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Hmmm... the Phantom of the Opera may well declare, "It is I!", but I note that in that construction I follows is, in which position using I may well be uncommon (nowadays), although it's not considered 'bizarre'. And it goes nicely in more extended (and flowery) declarations: "It is I, the one whom you have pined over all those many nights!"

Yet it would seem more odd for even the Phantom of the Opera to respond to a query, "Who loves the music of the night?" flatly with, "I." Nevertheless, inspired by this image, it seems slightly less odd (in my mind) if I extend the answer as in, "Who loves the music of the night?" — "I, the Phantom of the Opera."

Anyways, I don't have a problem with the answer to my question being, "Just the normal pronoun." The trouble was that it seemed to be excluded from all of the extant senses. Fortunately Kwamikagami has cleaned the entry up and added a new sense which covers it.

@-sche: I'm not dogmatic that the one-word-response usage has to be covered/explained explicitly, but that is certainly a lot better than what we had before, where that usage was apparently excluded from every sense.

—DIV (1.145.112.83 11:46, 20 April 2024 (UTC))

I see a sense has been added specifically to cover this. That's reasonable, though we need such a sense at him, them etc too in that case. And I think, for clarity, it'd be helpful to group the object senses together and the subject senses together, rather than interleaving them (I had to look closely at the two "As the subject of a verb." senses to figure out what difference we were trying to convey). - -sche (discuss) 17:59, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Grouping them would make sense. I made a start, but a more rigorous separation would be good. Sorry, I didn't see this was an ongoing discussion, just noticed a sense was missing.

Pedantically, I suppose the isolated pronoun would be "me" or "I" depending on its implied role, but I wonder if that was ever actually part of English grammar. A lot of pedantic grammar seems to be, "Latin does X, so that must be correct."

I wonder how much the object forms taking over has to do with the historical influence French, where "je" and "me" are clitics and the only independent pronoun is "moi" -- e.g. "c'est moi".

We should probably add a note on hypercorrection for use with a conjunction. (BTW, I believe the same thing happens with "or" as with "and" -- who's going, him or me? It's like they're objects of the conjunction or something.) People who say "X and I", probably because they learned it in school or their parents did, generally do that even when it's a grammatical object, or an object of a preposition ("just between you and I"), so it's the distinction that has apparently been lost. kwami (talk) 19:37, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

With the set phrase "us and them", it's ambiguous between the form in isolation (no verb or preposition to govern case) and the conjunctive form, so I don't know if that would be a useful example. kwami (talk) 19:48, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Wow, that was a timely coincidence then!

Sorry, this may not be the main focus, but is "Who's going, him or me?" really hypercorrection? "Who's going, him or me?" seems to me like very common usage that might nonetheless be wrong to a grammar pedant, who may insist on "Who's going, he or I?" or (better?) "Who shall go, he or I?", because that's consistent with "He/I shall go." I thought hypercorrection was application of a (possibly pedantic) rule of grammar outside of its proper scope. Like if somebody wrongly thought that whom is somehow a more correct version of who, and thus asks *"Whom's going, him or me?"

—DIV (1.145.105.155 02:58, 23 April 2024 (UTC))

Sorry, for "or" I only meant that it triggers the objective case just as "and" does, so we shouldn't say this happens to pronouns joined by "and" (which is how one entry was worded) -- we should say it happens to pronouns joined by a conjunction. The stuff about hypercorrection should've been a separate paragraph.

You're right. The hypercorrection is when you say "me and you are going" (normal English) and are told you should say "you and I are going" (pedantic English) instead. But when you change that, you also change "he saw me and you" to hypercorrect *"he saw you and I" and "just between you and me" to *"just between you and I". The starred forms are incorrect according to the grammar books, but it's much more difficult to teach people the difference (which has been lost from modern English) than to get them to change "me and" to "and I" everywhere. kwami (talk) 03:10, 23 April 2024 (UTC)