arbitrary case-marking?

[david_tuggy at SIL.ORG]

     Noel Rude wrote:

        **When languages die--at least I see this here--there is the tendancy to
seize upon certain phonological and morphological features of the old
system as markers of "Indianness".  ... Obviously this is not the same
thing as is going on in the vibrantly alive language Tamil.  Or is it?
One wonders--where a case marking system is breaking down (as in some
German dialects?)--do we see a similar tendancy?  Where some speakers no
longer control a system, might they try to exploit it for some other
effect?  Perhaps this way (over time) a structural feature could even
change function, thus effecting a "crazy" historical change.  Such might
even wash back over speakers for whom the system was not breaking down.
        **

        Sounds right on to me. And one place we can see this sort of thing
        happening is in English. The language itself is of course far from
        moribund, but some parts of it are: e.g. the archaic thees & thous and
        the verb forms that used to go along with them, or the vestiges of
        nominative - accusative marking on pronouns. I keep running across
        "arbitrary" usages of some of these features, things like "unto thou
        who knoweth all things", or "he sayest", from the pens of people who
        should know better (e.g. in stuff that has made it past the editors of
        Time or Reader's Digest). Perhaps the most egregious, repeated ad
        nauseum (yes, that is another one) in the press this past year, is the
        misquotation "Let he who is without sin ..." "Let him ..." would
        probably, by now, grate on the ears of most Americans almost as badly
        as "Let he ..." does on mine.

        These usages break the rules that used to be conventional, and the
        motivation for breaking those rules would be difficult to identify with
        much certainty. Sometimes people seem to be attempting some ponderous
        sort of humor, but often as not they are probably just unconsciously
        demonstrating ignorance, sometimes pretentious ignorance. Perhaps the
        rule has changed for them to something like "sprinkle -eth's and -est's
        on non-1st-person verbs, and occasionally reverse the
        "nominative/accusative" markings on pronouns, in order to mark a
        (mock-) archaic or high-falutin' speech style." In any case, the usages
        would certainly look "arbitrary" to a linguist trained to classify
        under that rubric anything not fully systematic and predictable.

        As for "washing back", I have caught myself, purist though I be,
        starting to say "he and I" instead of "him and me" in answer to a
        question like "Who did they send it to?". And whom among us would
        invariably include the -m on the interrogative pronoun in that last
        question?

        --David Tuggy