To the person who complained about people giving out to other people whose first language is not English: I don't have a problem with someone who does not speak perfect English being a member of and contributing to our forum - I must admit it's a little frustrating for me to read bad English but that's one of my flaws, nothing to do with them. I do however start to get frustrated when people who should and often do know how to write good English with proper punctuation and grammar don't bother when they are "online" (yes, I believe that's actually supposed to be "on-line" if we're being "anal"). Someone who writes words just as they would (incorrectly) pronounce them is equally frustrating. Using the word "hear" as "here" and "to" as "too" and the several combinations of wrong ways to express the word "their" is one thing, but when your sentences look like this... ... my grammar Nazi persona really comes out to play. I just have a problem with people who are lazy about writing and speaking, period. Kidulthood and Adulthood were two films that I could barely stand to listen to, never mind watch. The really sad thing is that a lot of UK cities have youths speaking in that slack jawed English street slang crap. If I hear another hooded prat using the word "safe" in a manner other than directed by the Oxford English dictionary the next time I'm in England, I am going to do my utmost to go and find an actual safe and drop it on them. And yes, I had to edit this post after reading it. Because my English is good, but this Trust keyboard sucks
No, it's whom if the reply to that would be "him/her" and who if it would be "he/she". That's my rule of thumb. With blank do you wish to speak? I wish to speak with him/her. So the blank may be replaced with whom. The real truth is that the word 'whom' was invented so that one could sound like a posh english butler.
In all fairness, I do that a lot, and its is because I sometimes start a post then decide to finish it later, so I copy it into a word doc. When I paste it back in it sometimes just appears like that, and because I've already checked for typos in Word, I just post and forget.
So "who" is used when you are referring to someone specific and "whom" is used when you are asking about someone you have no idea who is? The Norwegian version is "han" or "ham". Both means "him" but "han" is used when talking about specific people while "ham" is when the person in unknown. Oddly enough we don't have the same rules about "her".
Basically 'thou' is he/she/it singular and 'thee' is him/her/it. You have to remember the West Germanic origins of Olde English and so there were gender classes and singular/plural forms such as 'ye' and 'you' ('you' ended up being used for both singular and plural). Most of my understanding comes from having a Yorkshire dad though, 'ye' 'thee' and so on are still used from time to time.
Although the word "ye" as in "Ye Olde English Shoppe" actually comes about because of the Middle English letter "thorn" (which originally looked a bit like a lower-case b with a descender, but eventually morphed into something resembling a y) which was pronounced "th". Typesetters in the early days of printing didn't have a thorn symbol, so substituted Y instead, thus ending up with "Ye" for "The" - although it would still have been pronounced "the" not "yee".
