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

[Carol]

Oops. Premature post deleted! I'll try again:
> 
Carol earlier:
> > 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.
>
> Geoff:
> But that isn't correct, because the very reason we are discussing
this matter is that Modern English /has/ these objective cases or
accusative/dative cases because of the very existence of
him/her/me/us et al.

Carol again:
I don't quite understand you. Middle English had *already lost* the
inflections that distinguished accusative from dative case in Old
English. So Middle English *already* had objective case in place of
the other two, which had merged, the distinction in form having been lost.

You don't like Wikipedia (neither do I, really), so here's another source:

"Beginning in the Middle English period (A.D. 1100-1500), pronouns
began to look more like those we use. Below is a table of Middle
English pronouns.
Subjective Objective Possessive
First-person singular ich, I, ik me mi; min
Second-person singular thou thee thi, thin
Third-person singular he, she (hye), it (hit) him (hine), here
(hi), it (hit) his, hires (here), his

"First-person plural we us our, oure, oures
Second-person plural ye you your, youre, youres
Third-person plural hi, they, thai hem, heom, them, thaim, theim her,
here, their, theire, heres, theirs

"Along with some exotic words and spelling, notice that in Middle
English you could only be the second-person plural objective pronoun.
In the other places we use you today, Middle English speakers instead
used ye, thou, and thee.

"The movement from Middle English to Modern English took place during
A.D. 1500_1800. Shakespeare wrote during the late 1500s and early
1600s, and the King James Bible was first produced in 1611, so the
language in those works is Early Modern English. Below is a table of
the pronouns used in Early Modern English.
Subjective Objective Possessive
First-person singular I me my/mine
Second-person singular thou thee thy/thine
Third-person singular he (a), it (hit), she him, it (hit), her his,
its (it, his), hers

"First-person plural we us our/ours
Second-person plural ye/you you/ye your/yours
Third-person plural they them (hem, em) their/theirs

"As you can see, the familiar you and your has shown up, and the
spelling of many of the other pronouns is becoming standardized as
regional variants gradually disappear. At the same time, the thou,
thee, thy, and thine that still characterize some English speech
(Amish, for instance) are still in wide use."

http://wps.ablongman.com/long_hult_nch_3/0,9398,1483953-,00.html

Carol again:
Forgive the spacing glitches. I tried to fix them and somehow posted
prematurely. You can see how it's supposed to look by going to the
website.

My point is, English *lost* the accusative and dative cases, which
*merged* to become the objective case, when it lost the inflections
that distinguished those two cases. And that merger occurred at a time
when "thee" and "thou" were in use.

Carol, not sure what she has posted today because she keeps losing
posts by going to promising sites that turn out to be Google books
(don't go there unless you want a browser error that knocks you offline)