This is a trope for any fictional character for whom English is not their native language, and other circumstances, like cavemen in modern times and babies. Yet the more I think about it, the more unlikely (for lack of a better word) it feels to me. Is “me so horny” (to take an infamous example) something anybody of any non-English native language is likely to say? Or is it just one of those Hollywood things born out of racism?
Welcome to Jamaica.
As fossilized usage? No, I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I think a couple times I’ve heard Arabic speakers who know close to zero English valiantly trying to communicate something use objective forms for subjective case, but even then they tend to correct themselves eventually. I took a course once in interlanguage and I don’t think this particular usage ever came up.
It’s just a stupid movie trope, as you say.
To clarify, “me” is the correct pronoun in Jamaican Creole.
Yes, so it’s not “ESL.”
FWIW, I had one employee who was a Salvadoran immigrant and always said “me” when he should have said “I”, but he’s the only one(that I was aware of) out of the many Mexican and Central American immigrants I dealt with on a regular basis. He’s not a recent immigrant either - he’s been here since the mid-eighties, and I have been told that his Spanish grammar isn’t much better.
I hear people that speak English is their only language use “me” instead of “I” all the time. It’ pretty common.
“Jim and me went to store.”
Usually by the time people know “horny”, they would know “I” from “me”. There may still be occasional confusion along the lines of not remembering the exact word and fishing for it by going through similar ones. The trope is just a shorthand for other grammatical mistakes which are more frequent in reality but less obvious, and which wouldn’t be present in every sentence while using the wrong pronoun as the subject will be.
Yep, hear this all the time. “Me and Fred are going fishing tomorrow, wanna come?”
Yeah, this is an interesting one. “I and Fred are going fishing tomorrow” sounds wrong, even though it is right. At least it sounds wrong to me. Sure, you can reword it as “Fred and I are going fishing tomorrow” which sounds perfectly fine to me. But with a compound subject headed by the first person personal pronoun, the nominative/subjective “I” sounds odd to my ears (and I assume many others, given the commonality of the construction) compared with the subjective “me.” I wonder why that is.
Another example of this trope: “You can tell I’m foreign because I speak English except one word said in my native language.”
I’m fascinated by “character A, as written by clueless character B”. Back in the 60s, you’d have “With It” teens as written by middle-aged white guys. I grew up on Spider-Man comics, which were horrible at this. A hippie (who the artist drew with John Lennon glasses and woman’s hair, so we’d know) would say “We young people take drugs because we hate uptight straights, man!” while Mary Jane Watson would ask "Isn’t this mini-skirt just the ginchiest?"
I think it might be a case of cacophony, not in the meaning of “horrible-sounding noises” but of “difficult-to-make noises”. “I and…” is more difficult to pronounce than “me and…”; in order to pronounce it clearly it seems to me that I end up with different intonation, I need to mark the “I” a lot more than when it’s followed by other words.
It’s the same reason why in Spanish words which are feminine gender and begin by a- take the definite and indefinite masculine articles in the singular: las águilas (f, pl + f, pl) is easy to pronounce, el águila (m, s + f, s) is easy to pronounce, but la águila (f, s + f, s) needs an unusual microstop in the middle or the two words merge into láguila.
I think that we agree that “I am going fishing” and “Fred and I are going fishing” are correct, and you cannot use “me”. However, compare language like “it’s me” and it seems like people do not always think of “me” as objective, at least in all cases in the spoken language, or at least it may potentially confuse even native speakers.
Oh, sure. “It is I” sounds needlessly stuffy. “It’s me” is idiomatic, if not annoying to grammar pedants. You see similar structures in other languages. French, for example, has “C’est moi” and not “C’est je,” which sounds especially bad to my ears. In English you can at least say “It is I” and just be thought of as someone speaking in an overly formal (or grammatically “correct”) register. I’m not entirely sure “C’est je” can even be considered grammatical in French. (Then again, now that I think of it, is “it’s I” okay in English? I’ve heard “It is I” and “it’s me,” but never “It’s I.” The last should be grammatically correct, but it’s not a construction I’ve ever encountered.)
Yes, I’ll leave it up to the linguists, but “moi” as in “C’était moi” functions as a predicative attribute and “je” is not predicative, or something. “It was me” seems like it could be based on similar principles or perhaps even influenced by other languages. (OTOH cf. “es war ich”) Of course, English is not French nor Latin nor German, and it may have its own thing going on.
Sure. Had students and guest faculty from all over. Some had very little time to prep before they came in and had a long way to go. The more different their home language from English was the harder it was to pick up the language. So Spanish/German speakers not so much. East Asians more so.
But people pick up a new language surprisingly fast in an immersive environment like a college. 6 months later and they’re talking a lot better. But still the odd thing like I/me would be a problem in certain sentence constructs. And I’m not talking about the classic “Bob and me went to the store.” type of thing.
My experience talking to ESL people, and my experience trying to speak other languages is that this is quite common. You get partway through a sentence, realize you don’t know the word for the thing in the other language, and you can either throw your native word in there, divert and ask a question, or try some meandering description of the thing you don’t know the word for.
The word is often a more complex one that, at least between English and romance languages, is likely to be a cognate, so the sentence is often still comprehensible.
Me. :dubious:
Technically, English was my second language. Japanese was my first. But the difference is measured in days, since my Mom was Japanese and my Dad was American.
Yes, but the trope occurs as a ham-handed device in entertainment media not to represent how people actually talk, but as a signal. For example, a German says to an American who speaks no German, “Everyone on my Straße has a BMW,” because the thick German accent might not be enough for the audience to understand “This guy is German!”
Arguably, it ought to be “It am I”, but of course no one says it. For me, “It’s me” and “It is me” are preferred. The usage I really hate is “It is time for Mary and I to say goodbye.” Not only sounds terrible, but is ungrammatical to boot.