In Love with Norma Loquendi

New York, NY: Random House (NY), 1994. Trade paperback. Good. No dust jacket. In Love with Norma Loquendi BY WILLIAM SAFIRE SOFTCOVER FIRST EDITION-COPYRIGHT 1994-349 PAGES PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 349 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. In Love with Norma Loquendi BY WILLIAM SAFIRE SOFTCOVER FIRST EDITION-COPYRIGHT 1994-349 PAGES PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist describes his lifelong fascination with Norma Loquendi--common speech--in a collection of columns that celebrates the mysteries and continual evolution of the English language. 15, 000 first printing. BOOK REVIEW; Safire begins his book with an essay on copulas. Copulas are linking verbs, and most often they are formed from the verb "be." " John is a boy" is a copula. One of the traditional rules of English grammar is that a noun or pronoun must be in the nominative case to complete the meaning of a copula. These days in all but the most formal speech and writing pronouns in the objective case are more likely to be used with copulas. But then Safire makes an error. He writes "The grammatically pristine form of "Woe is me" is "Woe is I" or "Woe am I" but go tell that to Ophelia and Isaiha." "Woe is me" is not a copula. It is a "noun + verb + dative object" construction. There is no controversy here. The great grammarians Matzner, Abbott, Franz, Jespersen, Visser and so on have all demonstrated that in Early Modern English dative objects were less likely to have prepositions before them then dative objects today. Safire quotes a professor who says as much but Safire will have none of it. He says that Shakespeare did "intend to equate `woe' and `me. '" He then goes on to write "Sometimes the truth lies flat and you only confuse yourself looking for "understood" hidden words." By ignoring the facts Safire got it wrong. There is nothing hidden here. "Me" is understood to be a dative. In Old English the dative pronoun for the first person singular was "me, " the accusitive was "mec, " and the nomanitve was "ic." In Old English there was no need to use a preposition to mark the dative pronoun. In fact to use a preposition with a dative pronoun was a pleonasm. With the decay of inflectional forms in Middle English period, the pronoun "mec" became obsolete and was replaced by the dative pronoun "me". Because of this there rose a need to distinguish the dative from the accusitive and this was done by using prepositions. But the unmarked dative, the dative without a preposition remaind a regular feature English throughout the Early Modern English period.