Yeah, I’m not sure offhand of specific examples of ESL people using ‘me’ instead of ‘I’, but I’ve heard and read plenty of native English speakers do so.
I’ll do this sort of thing deliberately to sound more colloquial - you know, like the sort of guy who wouldn’t use words like “colloquial”.
I mean, me and the guys get along better if I ain’t seen as too intellectual-like.
My example is not ESL so it probably doesn’t count, but I knew a woman who would say, for instance, “I’m going to the store now, me.” It was more like a verbal tic and she had a couple of others. Ending a sentence with “and so” [when there wasn’t any “and” or “so” to follow up] and I can’t think of the other one. She was from Michigan so I thought it might be a Michgan thing, but maybe it was just her.
Exactly, but usually it’s much worse than even that. Typically it’s a Spanish-speaker who will rattle off a series of complex sentences with correctly used subordination and correctly back-shifted reported speech noun clauses–in order to advance the plot efficiently–but then who suddenly “forgets” the English word yes and says, “Si” instead.
The trope in the OP–the ***non-compound pronoun ***use (i.e., me alone)–of me for a nominative is something that English speaking children might do in very early language acquisition, which could explain how the trope started–as a way to infantilize non-native speakers. Apart from characters like the Cookie Monster, you don’t really hear it here–and by “here” I mean in California, where over 40% of the population speaks a language other than English at home, and a quarter of the population was born in another country.
“It am I” doesn’t make sense: the subject is “it”, not “I/me”. “Me” is the attributive complement. “I am it” makes sense; “it is me” makes sense; “it am I” is Yodaspeak.
Clearly one must parse “it am I” = “I am it”, except with funky word order. “I” is unambiguously the subject. Not something someone would answer when you ask who’s at the door, but part of a line in a poem, why not? (Cf “woe am I”, “woe is me” - what Ophelia actually said…)
So… you don’t know who Yoda is, I gather? Or, excuse me, know who Yoda is do you not?
When seven hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not.
“I it am” seems to be another variation. I make no claim that anybody today talks like that, and, evidently, neither did Shakespeare.
English is my first language, but I speak pretty fluent Spanish, and passable German once I’ve warmed up a bit. I checked into the Holiday Inn in Duesseldorf a few years ago, and managed to do it all in German, and was feeling pretty damned good about myself because, as I indicated, it takes me a while to re-acquaint myself with the seldom-used language. My wife at the time asked me, on our way to the room, why I kept saying “si” during the conversation. Not “yes,” not “ja,” but “si.” :smack:
alternate text (why doesn’t Wiki have the olde fashioned orthography?)