grammatically speaking...

[Peter A. McGraw]

Remember, though, that the people who produced the utterances the original
query was about were native speakers of French, not German (or earlier
varieties of English).

--On Wednesday, January 8, 2003 3:23 PM -0800 FRITZ JUENGLING
<juengling_fritz at SALKEIZ.K12.OR.US> wrote:

>>>> LBNath88545112 at AOL.COM 01/08/03 02:50PM >>>
> I think "explain me what you mean" probably is a calque on "explique-moi".
> That's the only explanation I can find for it.  And that doesn't make it
> grammatical English to my mind.  And I heard it again today.
>     "Open me a beer" seems to be "for me"
>
> Not necessarily.  In German, such constructions are common and they were
> more common in English a looong time ago.   As the dative and accusative
> cases merged, prepositions started doing more work.  This type of
> sentence 'open me a beer' is probably a relic of the use of the dative
> without a preposition.  "Explain me what you mean" does not bother me as
> much as it seems to bother others who have responded--probably because I
> am a German speaker (and have had quite a bit of experience with OE).
> German: Erklaer MIR, was du meinst.  I even find myself saying such
> things in English periodically. Fritz Juengling
>
>
> and not "to me" as in the first
> case.  Does "close me the window" work??
>
> Lois Nathan



****************************************************************************
                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu