JK Rowling pens a Harry Potter prequel / War of Roses/Holmes?Figg/Walpurga

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> .... the English cases are subjective (corresponds to nominative),
> objective (corresponds to accusative), and possessive (corresponds
to genitive).
> 
Me [CJ, not "me", Carol!]:
> A minor correction here: what modern grammarians like to call the
"objective" case in English is really a merging of both the accusative
and the dative of Old English.

Carol responds:
The term "objective case" makes perfect sense since English uses the
same pronoun form for objects of whatever type: direct objects,
indirect objects, and objects of prepositions. There's no need to
distinguish accusative from dative when there's no distinction in form.

Carol earlier:
> Possibly you're thinking of Latin. English doesn't have an
accusativecase....
> 
> Me [CJ]:
> But "thou" and "thee" are fixed-form remnants of Middle English,
which did have nominative and accusative cases. Therefore Geoff is
correct here: "thee" is (both) the accusative (and dative) form of the
nominative "thou".

>
Carol responds:
It *functions* as both accusative and dative, but it's *called*
objective, at least as retained in Modern English, which has no
accusative or dative cases. The same applies to early Modern English
of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, when "thee" and "thou" were
still in use.

"In Early Modern English, there were two second-person personal
pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, which was both
the plural pronoun and the formal singular pronoun (like modern French
tu and vous or the German du and Sie). (Thou was already falling out
of use in the Early Modern English period, but remained customary for
addressing God and certain other solemn occasions, and sometimes for
addressing inferiors.) Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye had
different forms depending on their grammatical case; specifically,
objective form of thou was thee, its possessive forms were thy and
thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form was thyself <snip>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English#Pronouns

Carol, noting that the accusative and dative cases merged with Early
Modern English, becoming what modern grammarians label "the objective
case" at that point, there being no point in distinguishing the cases
when the forms were the same