Than

[FRITZ JUENGLING]

Interestingly, German requires nominative after 'als' (than), e.g. Er ist grosser als ICH, but Norwegian requires objective "Han er storer enn MEG. (diacritics ignored).
I have wondered for some time whether English was influenced by Norwegian, but objective use would have to be about a 1000 years old.  Doesn't sound like it is.
I don't find the sentence in the original query grammatical and I had never heard of 'than' being a preposition.  I have trouble accepting it as such. Does the use of the objective case after 'than' mean that 'than' must be a preposition? I don't think so. If so, what about '...between you and I"? Is 'between' no longer a preposition because a nominative follows?

I don't miss diagramming sentences.  It seemed useless to me as a kid and now that I have a PHD in Philology, I still can't see much use in it. The only thing I ever learned was how to plan so that I could get the whole tree on the paper. Ironically, I was very good at it. That's just my personal take. I was shocked two days ago in German class when one student said "We should diagram sentences." I'm not sure what she wants from it.
Fritz Juengling


>I miss diagramming sentences.  It made for clear explanations of a lot of
>complicated grammatical situations.  Specifically, for me diagramming >made the
>entire who-whom business clear.  Granted it is a prescriptivist tool, but it was
a nice tool.

Diagramming, unfortunately in my opinion, has gone out of fashion.  My kids
were never taught it.  Their middle school English teacher agrees with me that
it is a loss, but he can't change fashion all by himself.

    - Jim Landau