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

[Carol]

Lee wrote:
> But the case you've rested is not the case under discussion. I don't
think anyone has disputed that many, even most, modern authorities
have subsumed the accusative and dative cases into the catch-all
objective case.

Carol responds:
Odd. that's not the impression I received from your posts and Geoff's,
or from your comment below (which I'll answer in a moment) about when
the concept of objective case for the merged dative and accusative
case emerged.
 
CJ:
> This discussion started with Geoff's observation that "thee" is the
accusative (and, I added, the dative) case form of "thou". You
countered that since modern English has no accusative or dative "thee"
must therefore be called "objective" case. To which I responded that
"thee" is an archaism from a time when English DID have accusative and
dative cases (and long before anyone had ever heard of the "objective
case"), and thus "thee" can no more be called "objective case" than
can OE "hine". Certainly grammarians of the time would "object".

Carol responds:
But "thou" and "thee" are not Old English pronouns, nor do they date
to a time when English distinguished between the accusative and the
dative through inflected endings. They're Middle English pronouns
preserved to some extent in Early Modern English, and, as I've said
before, the dative and accusative inflections *had already
disappeared* in Middle English. 

Can you show me a distinct dative form of "thee"? Even in Old English,
the accusative/dative distinction had disappeared in the first- and
second-person pronouns, the second-person pronouns being only "thu,"
"the," and "thin" (I can't do a thorn on this computer, so I'm
substituting "th"), which became, in ME and Early Modern English,
"thou," "thee," "thy/thine"--exactly the same variants we find for the
modern second-person singular pronoun "you." 

CJ: 
>  From there the discussion branched out into whether the subsumption
by modern grammarians of the accusative and dative into the objective
case is problematic and whether attempts to anachronistically recast
the remaining accusative and dative features of English syntax in 
"objective" terms is helpful or merely obfuscatory. I provided
examples of points at which I believe it obscures and confuses, rather
than enlightens.

Carol responds:
Whether it helps or hurts is rather beside the point as it's a done
deal, like the change from presecriptive to descriptive in
dictionaries. Having taught English, however, I assure you it's easier
to teach students with little or not exposure to highly inflected
languages the concept of an objective pronoun (as applied to direct
object, indirect object, and objects of prepositions, etc.) than the
concepts of dative and accusative, which are extinct in English and
have not been distinguished in most pronouns for a thousand years.

You're entitled to think that it obscures and confuses rather than
enlightens, but, having taught college English (and, for one year,
high school English), I have a feeling that high school students
(already insufficiently exposed to grammar, as Geoff pointed out)
would find the terminology confusing. At least "objective" actually
ties in with the uses to which the case is put.

CJ: 
> I'm still trying to determine the history of the modern objective
case construct. So far, I can't find any reference predating the early
20th century, and the two 19th century authorities I have located
(Coleridge and Clark) do discuss the accusative and dative cases.

> Does anyone know when the "objective case" first appeared in the 
grammatical authorities?

Carol:
The only Coleridge I'm familiar with is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, so
I'm not familiar with Coleridge and Clark. I did, however, find an
1878 text, "English Grammar, including the Principles of Grammatical
Analysis," by one C. P. Mason, B.A., F.C.P., Fellow of University
College, London, which states:

"Many older writers make a grievous mistake in trying to dress out
English constructions in a Latin garb, being misled by the notion that
Latin grammar is a sort of universal test and touchstone of all
grammatical questions" (vii, n.).

Later, (after a reminder that English is a Germanic and not a Romance
language and that modern English is an analytical as opposed to an
"inflectional" language), Mason defines "case" as "the form in which a
noun or pronoun is used, in order to show the relationship in which it
stands to some other word in the sentence" and adds:

"In English there are now* three cases, the Nominative Case, the
Possessive Case, and the objective Case" (24).

The * leads to a note stating, "English was anciently a much more
inflected language than it is now. When it was in its Anglo-Saxon
stage, nouns and pronouns had five cases, answering to the Nominative,
Genitive, Dative, Accusative, and Ablative of Latin <snip>. In modern
English (as in French), the use of case-endings has to a great extent
been replaced by the use of prepositions. <snip> It will easily be
seen how, in the course of time, the case-ending in the word that
followed a preposition would become superfluous, when prepositions
were uniformly followed by the same cases. <snip> But though in modern
English and French a preposition followed by a noun is the
*substitute* for a case it is wrong to call that combination itself a
*case* <snip> (24 n., emphais in original).

Of course, that paragraph relates to the merging of the ablative and
accusative cases with regard to objects of prepositions, but it could
also relate to the dative to the extent that it is represented in
English by "to," stated or implied.

With regard to the objective case, Mason says, "the objective case is
that form in which a noun or pronoun is used when it stands for the
object of the action spoken of in some verb, or when it comes after a
prepostion. <snip> The objective case is often used, like the Latin
dative, to indicate the *indirect object* <snip definition and
examples> (310>

More to the point, the section on case in modern English is followed
by a note beginning, "The endeavor to distinguish a *dative* and an
*accusative* case in modern English is at variance with the genius
[spirit] and history of the language. We see from the pronouns (see
Appendix A) that the form which maintained its ground was the dative,
which first ousted the ablative and usurped its functions, and then
did the same with the accusative. It is unphilosophical to
re-introduce distinctions which a language has ceased to recognise.
,snip> As there is but one *form* <snip examples> to denote both the
direct and the indirect object, not only is nothing gained, but an
important piece of linguistic history is obscured by having two names
for it. It is much better to use the common name *objective* <snip> 
(31 n., emphasis in original).

I've probably quoted too extensively and bored the pants off anyone
not interested in grammar, but I wanted to make it clear that, first,
the distinction between dative and accusative ceased to exist when Old
English became Middle English, and therefore has no bearing on the
Middle English/Early Modern English pronoun "thee/thou" (which never
had a different form for accusative and dative) and that, at least by
1876 and probably earlier, arguments for abandoning Latin terminology
for English grammar were being made on the grounds that the
inflections had been dropped and the distinction in form lost for all
but three cases (nominative or subjective, objective, and possessive)
in personal pronouns and all but two (nominative and possessive) in
nouns (the nominative or subjective and the objective forms being the
same).   
 
I lost the file and can't look up Appendix A, but I've probably bored
everyone sufficiently, anyway.

Carol, still maintaining that dative and accusative were already
merged in Middle English and are no more applicable to "thee" than to
to the modern "you" (and that "objective case" nicely encapsulates the
primary functions of pronouns used as direct objects, indirect
objects, and objects of prepositions, all serving an objective
function with no difference in form)