Mini pumps

It’s taken me a while to react to this, as I didn’t know the answer fully. A bit of research was required, and I'm not sure I've got it right.

No, that’s you and I, Oli.

You and ME.

I’ll grant you the accent but get the fucking grammar correct.

Why is it me and not I?

I’m not sure in that case. One would say “I speak English with a funny accent” (not “me speak English with a funny accent”), so I’m tempted to agree with Hippy?

No doubt Oliver will correct us all soon.

(you should have just said “us”, Hippy).

[aussie accent] Thats you and me both, bruce [/aussie accent]
[aussie accent] Thats you and I both, bruce [/aussie accent]

Defo ‘me’.

I had first written “me and you” and then thought that was wrong because you are supposed to put the other person first or something.. then swapped it for the you and I thing. Considering the volume I type and the fact I’m working at the same time, I’m doing ok. I see more mistakes in newspapers and those fuckers get paid to write shit.

‘You and me’ is correct in this case. At first, I thought it had to be because ‘I’ is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and only used for the subject of a sentence, not an object. However, that sentence is an identity statement and given that the sentence doesn't have an object, it would be a rather strange case of object usage in a sentence.

I don’t know the grammatical term, in English grammar, for a noun phrase like the one in which this occurs, and I’m not sure how contemporary English grammarians would analyse it—couldn’t find anything and it’s a long time since I did any of this, so this may be wrong. However, it seems that the reason is the strength, in English, of a sort of equivalent to the French ‘forme tonique’ of a personal pronoun:

http://66.46.185.79/bdl/gabarit_bdl.asp?id=3406

It seems that there are certain cases where in order to add emphasis, the form ‘me’ ('moi' in French) is used instead of ‘I’, but I don’t think that ‘me’ in this case is grammatically the same form (although it obviously sounds the same) as the ‘me’ that is required in phrases like ‘to me’ or ‘for me’, i.e. what may roughly be described as a vestigial form of the original Old English cases (dative and accusative having faded in unsystematic modern English grammar).

This may well stem from Norman influence—don’t know if that’s the case, though. I don’t know whether there are particular rules for this form, either—it seems that for the purpose of determining whether it’s the non-’forme tonique’ (‘I’) or the ‘forme tonique’ (‘me’) depends on applying your general familiarity with the language to the method that mashton uses:

Because them’s the rules.

To determine it, take the other person(s) out of the sentence and recast it. Then use the same personal pronoun.

e.g.

You would say: “No that’s me, Oliver.”
not “No that’s I, Oliver”.

Hence it becomes: “No that’s you and me, Oliver”.

Ta Da!

Anyway, this guess may be completely wrong, and corrections by proper grammarians would be appreciated.