As someone who doesn't even believe in the unity of Afro-Asiatic since none of the Semiticists he's personally met seem to be too convinced of it, that question you quoted pretty much immediately made me want to facepalm.
dEhiN wrote:When I posted that here, linguoboy used a Swedish example to show that there is at least one other Germanic language which allows for it. Except now Johanna basically said that his example doesn't sound natural, and a more natural sounding example wouldn't allow for a mixed case.
Just a little correction here:
I'm the one who brought up the Swedish example.
I think even a prescriptive grammarian or English teacher needs to accept that both mixed and non-mixed subjects are acceptable in English.
An English teacher, sure. I don't expect prescriptive grammarians to accept pretty much anything, though, and I don't see why they should accept some things (but not others).
Meaning, I think that my friend's view is an older view used by English teachers in the past, and nowadays that view is no longer the case.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. I understand this a bit differently (though I'm not too sure how accurate all this is): I thought it was always possible in English to have certain kinds of oblique-case subjects (e.g.
me and him went to the store lol why is this example so common? It's always about the fucking store. It should be something like me and him were axe murderers and partners in crime. ). Then, during the Renaissance at the earliest, a prescriptive rule was developed, based on Latin and such, that subjects must always be in nominative/subjective/whatever case, which I guess would give e.g.
I and he or
he and I instead of
me and him or
him and I. Then on top of that, there was a further rule introduced later that the word
I should always come at the end of such phrases; this is the rule linguoboy was talking about.
While it may indeed have been intended to deflect attention/emphasis/whatever from the speaker, when I went to school, no one explained what the motivation for any of these rules was, only that "and I" should always come at the end, and possibly that subjects should be in subjective case and objects in oblique case. However, there was also a kind of hypercorrection that took place, motivated by the generalization that when these phrases included
I in them at all, they should always end with
and I regardless of their position in the sentence, leading to
him and I alongside
him and me and
he and I.
(And then from there, the story gets even more complicated, at least in part because ______ and I is more acceptable in some constructions than in others even when the constructions appear to be very similar).