I was trying earlier to think of a famous novel written in a form of dialect. Mark Twain reports the characters talking in dialect, but I can't remember if the narrator also does.
Isn't Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce in dialect? I can't honestly remember, but I do recall that it is hard to understand.
Another thought: popular fiction book are, presumably, reflective of the way many or most readers experience English, on the whole.
I'm guessing that Joyce, and other authors who ignored the usual rules of punctuation and grammar, did so in order to create a certain literary style in the mind of readers. It was designed to be "weird" in order to influence the state of mind of the reader.
Most novels are not quite that deliberate, I think. Most are probably trying to talk to the majority of readers in a way they understand and with language they commonly use.
Academic language is a different thing. One is not trying to talk to a wide audience but a particularly narrow audience that is familiar with lots of jargon and a very specific style.
If I write Tom and me, and they want me to change it to Tom and I, I will. There are no grammatical hills I want to die on. Except for my Oxford Comma, of course.
It's strange how people ignore dialect and idiolect. It seems clear to me that "Me and John" in subject position, is used in some dialects, in fact, I hear it all the time. I suppose some are saying that dialects are "wrong". So it goes.
"That ain't a good a word as circumwented, Sammy, said Mr Weller gravely". (The Pickwick Club, shows Dickens using the v/w switch, now disappeared, I think).
In the trial scene Tony Weller, Sam's father, confirms that his name is "Veller, spelt with a we".
Either way, is anyone trying to argue that Joyce was a poor writer in English because of his choice of grammar?
Ulysses is impossible to understand, as it contains nothing to be understood. Portrait otoh is a good straightforward novel.
Now now, no need to get me all riled up defending my man Joyce. Everything he wrote, and meant to publish, is great. There, solves that.
Portrait utilizes dialect but is not considered a dialect novel. Likewise with Ulysses. I’m not as good with British novels as I am with American, and I’m better at poetry overall, but true dialect novels in America don’t come about until the Harlem Renaissance, I believe. Most earlier attempts aren’t considered dialect because they just use standard English and non-standard orthography to convey dialect. Not the same.
It is a "serial comma". There's no Oxford involved. This is a new term for an old thing in my part of the world. Online has Harvard also wanting credit. Neither really register as important in my part of the world.
...Yes, it's simple. Doesn't mean it's wrong. And yes, this universe.
I miswrote - I've heard it, of course - but I've never seen it in print. And I don't care to, because it's wronger than a wrong thing that is wrong.
The rule is too simple to mess up: It has to make sense with one person as well as more than one. "Tom and I went to the pub" works with "I went to the pub." "She gave the bottle to Tom and me" works with "She gave the bottle to me." "Me and Tom went to the pub" doesn't work because "Me went to the pub" doesn't work. "She gave the bottle to Tom and I" doesn't work because "She gave the bottle to I" doesn't work."
Unless this is to appear in a work of fiction in which a character is to be portrayed as uneducated, the rule matters.
...There are no grammatical hills I want to die on. Except for my Oxford Comma, of course.
It is a "serial comma". There's no Oxford involved. This is a new term for an old thing in my part of the world. Online has Harvard also wanting credit. Neither really register as important in my part of the world.
The Oxford Comma always has the Oxford involved, because that was where it was first promoted, by the OUP style guide. Horace Hart, 1905. And even if the previous sentence is entirely untrue, it's still called the Oxford Comma.
Language is applied maths, not pure maths. It's only important because of what it can do, not because of what it is.
Ulysses is impossible to understand, as it contains nothing to be understood.
I am so glad to hear somebody say that. I managed to force myself to read about 2/3 of it before I figuratively threw it against the wall. I would have literally thrown it against the wall but it was the library's copy and I fastidiously care for what I borrow.
It is a "serial comma". There's no Oxford involved. This is a new term for an old thing in my part of the world. Online has Harvard also wanting credit. Neither really register as important in my part of the world.
The Oxford Comma always has the Oxford involved, because that was where it was first promoted, by the OUP style guide. Horace Hart, 1905. And even if the previous sentence is entirely untrue, it's still called the Oxford Comma.
Language is applied maths, not pure maths. It's only important because of what it can do, not because of what it is.
Oxford Comma sounds like the name of a deadly pub.
Ulysses is impossible to understand, as it contains nothing to be understood.
I am so glad to hear somebody say that. I managed to force myself to read about 2/3 of it before I figuratively threw it against the wall. I would have literally thrown it against the wall but it was the library's copy and I fastidiously care for what I borrow.
Ulysses is impossible to understand, as it contains nothing to be understood.
I am so glad to hear somebody say that. I managed to force myself to read about 2/3 of it before I figuratively threw it against the wall. I would have literally thrown it against the wall but it was the library's copy and I fastidiously care for what I borrow.
We are not alone in our opinion. Dubliners and Portrait are good of their time, and it's interesting to compare Portrait with Stephen Hero if you can find a copy. But after then the signs of real promise vanished, probably drowned in alcohol.
Ulysses is impossible to understand, as it contains nothing to be understood.
I am so glad to hear somebody say that. I managed to force myself to read about 2/3 of it before I figuratively threw it against the wall. I would have literally thrown it against the wall but it was the library's copy and I fastidiously care for what I borrow.
We are not alone in our opinion. Dubliners and Portrait are good of their time, and it's interesting to compare Portrait with Stephen Hero if you can find a copy. But after then the signs of real promise vanished, probably drowned in alcohol.
Not alone, no, just the minority.
Always baffling to me that people argue “I don’t understand it, therefore bad.”
Anyways, if you insist on having a scrap about Joyce I’m always delighted to do so, though I doubt this thread is the place. Though, pedantry? Something to be said for that.
Do you guys have a club? How do you tally hundreds of thousands reading a book when you yourself said you only read 2/3 of it? Does reading most of a book count as reading a book? And how do you account for the millions then who’ve read it and found it meaningful? I say millions because Joyceans are a real bunch and I’ve only ever met one particularly dull one who thought Ulysses bad but the work beforehand good. Joycean is probably too kind, as this individual displayed a poor grasp of most of Joyce’s life, but no matter.
The argument is “x was not understood, therefore x is bad.” Spruce it up with appeals to authority all you like, the form is the same. I always cringe when I see that argument.
Oxford Comma sounds like the name of a deadly pub.
Oxford Comma sounds like the name of an over-the-top artsy band.
Oxford Comma is actually a song by Vampire Weekend, which, depending on one's tastes, might fit your description.
Rossweise, I used the pub example, dropping Tom out to show how "I" and "me" change, on this or another thread in the last few days, and it seemed to get me nowhere.
Skipping over to Ulysses... absolute genius. There are sections which are lol funny (e.g., the cyclops), others jaw dropping in the seamless changing of gears (the hospital). In my observation, people get tripped up by the long, difficult first section, and it leaves them in poor humour for the rest of the book, as they think that the rest of the book is going to be long, difficult chunks, and think, Oh, Good Lord... . The first section is like Joyce giving the finger to the reader and saying, "I fuckin' dare ya." I took the dare, and it paid off. YMMV. I'm lining up with ECraigR on this one.
Do you guys have a club? How do you tally hundreds of thousands reading a book when you yourself said you only read 2/3 of it? Does reading most of a book count as reading a book? And how do you account for the millions then who’ve read it and found it meaningful? I say millions because Joyceans are a real bunch and I’ve only ever met one particularly dull one who thought Ulysses bad but the work beforehand good. Joycean is probably too kind, as this individual displayed a poor grasp of most of Joyce’s life, but no matter.
The argument is “x was not understood, therefore x is bad.” Spruce it up with appeals to authority all you like, the form is the same. I always cringe when I see that argument.
The more people don't understand something you've written, the more you need to ask yourself if it's them or if it's you. That's not an appeal to authority, but nice dodge.
So, Joyce bad because he failed the mousethief test? All you've done is whinge about Ulysses without providing any material example of what makes it such a bad book. And, yes, I recognise that there's a healthy dollop of subjectivity in any criticism, but give me something on which to hang your dislike for it.
So, Joyce bad because he failed the mousethief test? All you've done is whinge about Ulysses without providing any material example of what makes it such a bad book. And, yes, I recognise that there's a healthy dollop of subjectivity in any criticism, but give me something on which to hang your dislike for it.
Why? I don't owe you anything. I read it and hated it. Clearly I'm not the only one. It's been controversial for just his reason since it was written. Get. Over. It.
It's not that you owe me a thing. I'm try to engage you in good faith, despite this being Hell, and you get all pissy with me. I neither said nor implied that you're an idiot for not liking it, and usually your posts display a good deal of thought going on. Sorry that I expected you to live up to your own standards, and which you have expected from others.
Well okay you haven't been acting the way some other people here have been. It's hard not to feel under attack when you say you don't like a book and they turn the "how dare you!" fire hoses on you.
The thing is, it was a hell of a lot of words to tell very little story. The words didn't pop and crackle; they were like wading through sludge. I prefer language that is sparkly and imaginative, and can withstand a fairly dull story if the writing is good. On the other hand, if a story is really good but the writing is flat, I can live with that. (I found Gaiman's The Graveyard Book to be this way.) But Ulysses was the worst of both worlds. There was all but no story, and the prose was an assault. It read like a 16 year old trying to be clever. (Actually all of the writing by 16 year olds I've read was clearer and more to the point than Ulysses.) It's as if he was having a game at the reader's expense and hoping you didn't notice. I noticed.
If we choose to read conventional realist fiction, we can expect a linear chronological narrative with fully rounded characters, a plausible plot and sometimes a moral lesson at the end or an inspirational focus that makes us feel like better people. We can expect to find recognisable (Western) societies and places, historical verisimilitude and motivations, scenes involving conflict and romance and a compelling pace that ends in a satisfying denouement. That is what many people enjoy reading and have established sets of criteria to work out if the plot is convincing and the characters likeable or 'real'.
Somewhere around the early decades of the 20th century (and I'm compressing a great deal here), literary Modernism emerged among writers and poets (as well as artists) who wanted to show that their experience of 'reality' and society was fractured, irrational, alinear and unconventional. If we read experimental Modernist authors like TS Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, etc, we need different criteria and to read these works in a different way. What Joyce does with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is like a brilliant puzzle, labyrinthine, groundbreaking and innovative. It can't be read as if it is Dickens or Jane Austen: I find I need to look back to the picaresque of Diderot or the faux-biography of Cervantes or the art of Cezanne or Picasso for analogies. A very different paradigm.
First we are told "correct" English is that we find in good literature and enforced by an army of educated editors and proofreaders.
Which suggests that the bastion of correct English is the corpus of written literature.
To the extent that when someone explains that a proofreader told him to use "incorrect" English, that is a mistake.
And yet here we have writers who break the rules and they are said to be working from a "different paradigm".
Not all of these things can simultaneously be true. Either "correct" English exists as a thing outside of usage in literature or literature itself, in all its messy variation is an exemplar of English or literature (deliberately, knowingly or not) reflects the English that readers actually use.
My mother had a Thing about People Who Speak Badly and would refuse to listen or take any notice of anyone who failed to meet her standards of perfection.
It is not a good look. Take people as they are. If you don't understand ask for clarification.
If you, like my mother, decide that people are not worth listening to because of their accent, their dialect, the words they use and the grammar they drop, then eventually you end up talking only to yourself.
True up to a point but what if someone says "of course …. obviously..." when it is not clear to you at all?
Take a load of clay, put it in the hands of a sculptor, and she'll turn it into art. Hand the clay over to a potter instead, and he'll craft it into pitchers or mugs. Give the clay to a bunch of chefs experimenting with some weird combination of cutting-edge cuisine and Neolithic cooking methods and they'll layer it over the top of a pit in which they're roasting grasshoppers wrapped in banana leaves with emulsions of artichoke foam or something.
The differences have little to do with the clay; they have everything to do with those using it, their goals and intentions and methods.
True up to a point but what if someone says "of course …. obviously..." when it is not clear to you at all?
Academics can be good at that. They write a load of gobbledegook, failing to making their case but deliberately intending to obfuscate, and then make a huge logical jump, prefaced by the words, "Clearly, therefore ...".
If we choose to read conventional realist fiction, we can expect a linear chronological narrative with fully rounded characters, a plausible plot and sometimes a moral lesson at the end or an inspirational focus that makes us feel like better people. We can expect to find recognisable (Western) societies and places, historical verisimilitude and motivations, scenes involving conflict and romance and a compelling pace that ends in a satisfying denouement. That is what many people enjoy reading and have established sets of criteria to work out if the plot is convincing and the characters likeable or 'real'.
Somewhere around the early decades of the 20th century (and I'm compressing a great deal here), literary Modernism emerged among writers and poets (as well as artists) who wanted to show that their experience of 'reality' and society was fractured, irrational, alinear and unconventional. If we read experimental Modernist authors like TS Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, etc, we need different criteria and to read these works in a different way. What Joyce does with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is like a brilliant puzzle, labyrinthine, groundbreaking and innovative. It can't be read as if it is Dickens or Jane Austen: I find I need to look back to the picaresque of Diderot or the faux-biography of Cervantes or the art of Cezanne or Picasso for analogies. A very different paradigm.
Okay with a conventional novel, one can critique it as to character development, plot, pacing, register/tone, and so forth, and (unlike wine reviews) other readers will know roughly what you mean. It moved too slowly. The main character was two-dimensional. It plodded and nothing happened for long stretches. Much of the prose thudded. And so on.
In one of these groundbreaking modernist uncoventional alinear etc etc etc novels, is it possible to critique them? It is entirely gestalt? It hits you or it doesn't? Or is there anything you can grab onto and say this aspect was lacking in some way? If the answer is no, then it seems it's not so much art as anti-art, a slap in the reader's face.
Pangolin, Rossweisse, I don't think anyone here is unaware of that rule.
However, and this was my point about laws of physics and planets, clearly this isn't the rule many speakers are using. They consistently say "I am going into town" but also "Me and John are going into town".
That's why we talked about other rules that people might be following; we raised the possibility that it was a matter of complex and simple subjects, but in the end the rule which best described the widest range of usages was marked and unmarked forms. That's what linguists do; they observe actual utterances and analyse them to find the underlying rules speech communities actually use.
Take a load of clay, put it in the hands of a sculptor, and she'll turn it into art. Hand the clay over to a potter instead, and he'll craft it into pitchers or mugs. Give the clay to a bunch of chefs experimenting with some weird combination of cutting-edge cuisine and Neolithic cooking methods and they'll layer it over the top of a pit in which they're roasting grasshoppers wrapped in banana leaves with emulsions of artichoke foam or something.
The differences have little to do with the clay; they have everything to do with those using it, their goals and intentions and methods.
I don't think that means anything.
You've decided to die on a "correct English" hill and you'll keep fighting even when it is demonstrably gibberish.
Well okay you haven't been acting the way some other people here have been. It's hard not to feel under attack when you say you don't like a book and they turn the "how dare you!" fire hoses on you.
Nobody said they didn't like Ulysses. Gee D started from, 'Ulysses contains nothing to be understood,' and then you and he escalated.
Ulysses doesn't work for everyone. The early chapters don't work for me. The later ones do. That's ok.
Getting back to pedantry, from a judgment I read earlier this evening: who is nine years younger than him. I'd say that this is now correct - what do others think?
Getting back to pedantry, from a judgment I read earlier this evening: who is nine years younger than him. I'd say that this is now correct - what do others think?
Certainly the form most people would produce so yes.
Pangolin, Rossweisse, I don't think anyone here is unaware of that rule.
However, and this was my point about laws of physics and planets, clearly this isn't the rule many speakers are using. They consistently say "I am going into town" but also "Me and John are going into town".
That's why we talked about other rules that people might be following; we raised the possibility that it was a matter of complex and simple subjects, but in the end the rule which best described the widest range of usages was marked and unmarked forms. That's what linguists do; they observe actual utterances and analyse them to find the underlying rules speech communities actually use.
Put it down to lack of education about dialect. Also snobbery.
Conversely (and not from the Keeler film) one can imagine someone saying, "It weren't 'im wot done it, it were 'er". Grammatically "correct"? No. Comprehensible? Yes. And I'm a snob.
Conversely (and not from the Keeler film) one can imagine someone saying, "It weren't 'im wot done it, it were 'er". Grammatically "correct"? No. Comprehensible? Yes. And I'm a snob.
Difficult to find examples of Caribbean dialects and Creole. However, I found this:
"Aah, gyal, yah tink seh mi a ramp wid yuh?"
(Girl, you think I'm messing around with you?).
Lots of interesting details here, e.g., the /y/ in 'gyal', like some Irish dialects, but anyway, 'mi' is I. I am guessing that many Caribbean dialects/creoles use me and him in subject position.
Comments
This dialect.
Isn't Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce in dialect? I can't honestly remember, but I do recall that it is hard to understand.
Either way, is anyone trying to argue that Joyce was a poor writer in English because of his choice of grammar?
I'm guessing that Joyce, and other authors who ignored the usual rules of punctuation and grammar, did so in order to create a certain literary style in the mind of readers. It was designed to be "weird" in order to influence the state of mind of the reader.
Most novels are not quite that deliberate, I think. Most are probably trying to talk to the majority of readers in a way they understand and with language they commonly use.
Academic language is a different thing. One is not trying to talk to a wide audience but a particularly narrow audience that is familiar with lots of jargon and a very specific style.
Ulysses is impossible to understand, as it contains nothing to be understood. Portrait otoh is a good straightforward novel.
In the trial scene Tony Weller, Sam's father, confirms that his name is "Veller, spelt with a we".
Now now, no need to get me all riled up defending my man Joyce. Everything he wrote, and meant to publish, is great. There, solves that.
Portrait utilizes dialect but is not considered a dialect novel. Likewise with Ulysses. I’m not as good with British novels as I am with American, and I’m better at poetry overall, but true dialect novels in America don’t come about until the Harlem Renaissance, I believe. Most earlier attempts aren’t considered dialect because they just use standard English and non-standard orthography to convey dialect. Not the same.
Yes. That one.
The rule is too simple to mess up: It has to make sense with one person as well as more than one. "Tom and I went to the pub" works with "I went to the pub." "She gave the bottle to Tom and me" works with "She gave the bottle to me." "Me and Tom went to the pub" doesn't work because "Me went to the pub" doesn't work. "She gave the bottle to Tom and I" doesn't work because "She gave the bottle to I" doesn't work."
Unless this is to appear in a work of fiction in which a character is to be portrayed as uneducated, the rule matters.
Thank goodness! There, we can agree.
The Oxford Comma always has the Oxford involved, because that was where it was first promoted, by the OUP style guide. Horace Hart, 1905. And even if the previous sentence is entirely untrue, it's still called the Oxford Comma.
Language is applied maths, not pure maths. It's only important because of what it can do, not because of what it is.
I am so glad to hear somebody say that. I managed to force myself to read about 2/3 of it before I figuratively threw it against the wall. I would have literally thrown it against the wall but it was the library's copy and I fastidiously care for what I borrow.
Big sigh.
We are not alone in our opinion. Dubliners and Portrait are good of their time, and it's interesting to compare Portrait with Stephen Hero if you can find a copy. But after then the signs of real promise vanished, probably drowned in alcohol.
Not alone, no, just the minority.
Always baffling to me that people argue “I don’t understand it, therefore bad.”
Anyways, if you insist on having a scrap about Joyce I’m always delighted to do so, though I doubt this thread is the place. Though, pedantry? Something to be said for that.
No. It's "Hundreds of thousands of very intelligent people have read this book and agree that it was meaningless bullshit, therefore bad."
The argument is “x was not understood, therefore x is bad.” Spruce it up with appeals to authority all you like, the form is the same. I always cringe when I see that argument.
Oxford Comma is actually a song by Vampire Weekend, which, depending on one's tastes, might fit your description.
Rossweise, I used the pub example, dropping Tom out to show how "I" and "me" change, on this or another thread in the last few days, and it seemed to get me nowhere.
Skipping over to Ulysses... absolute genius. There are sections which are lol funny (e.g., the cyclops), others jaw dropping in the seamless changing of gears (the hospital). In my observation, people get tripped up by the long, difficult first section, and it leaves them in poor humour for the rest of the book, as they think that the rest of the book is going to be long, difficult chunks, and think, Oh, Good Lord... . The first section is like Joyce giving the finger to the reader and saying, "I fuckin' dare ya." I took the dare, and it paid off. YMMV. I'm lining up with ECraigR on this one.
The more people don't understand something you've written, the more you need to ask yourself if it's them or if it's you. That's not an appeal to authority, but nice dodge.
Why? I don't owe you anything. I read it and hated it. Clearly I'm not the only one. It's been controversial for just his reason since it was written. Get. Over. It.
The thing is, it was a hell of a lot of words to tell very little story. The words didn't pop and crackle; they were like wading through sludge. I prefer language that is sparkly and imaginative, and can withstand a fairly dull story if the writing is good. On the other hand, if a story is really good but the writing is flat, I can live with that. (I found Gaiman's The Graveyard Book to be this way.) But Ulysses was the worst of both worlds. There was all but no story, and the prose was an assault. It read like a 16 year old trying to be clever. (Actually all of the writing by 16 year olds I've read was clearer and more to the point than Ulysses.) It's as if he was having a game at the reader's expense and hoping you didn't notice. I noticed.
I was simply trying to suggest that acclaimed writing exists in English that doesn't follow the usual grammatical rules.
Is anyone arguing that it is bad because it is not following the grammatical rules?
Somewhere around the early decades of the 20th century (and I'm compressing a great deal here), literary Modernism emerged among writers and poets (as well as artists) who wanted to show that their experience of 'reality' and society was fractured, irrational, alinear and unconventional. If we read experimental Modernist authors like TS Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, etc, we need different criteria and to read these works in a different way. What Joyce does with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is like a brilliant puzzle, labyrinthine, groundbreaking and innovative. It can't be read as if it is Dickens or Jane Austen: I find I need to look back to the picaresque of Diderot or the faux-biography of Cervantes or the art of Cezanne or Picasso for analogies. A very different paradigm.
First we are told "correct" English is that we find in good literature and enforced by an army of educated editors and proofreaders.
Which suggests that the bastion of correct English is the corpus of written literature.
To the extent that when someone explains that a proofreader told him to use "incorrect" English, that is a mistake.
And yet here we have writers who break the rules and they are said to be working from a "different paradigm".
Not all of these things can simultaneously be true. Either "correct" English exists as a thing outside of usage in literature or literature itself, in all its messy variation is an exemplar of English or literature (deliberately, knowingly or not) reflects the English that readers actually use.
It can't be all of those things at once.
True up to a point but what if someone says "of course …. obviously..." when it is not clear to you at all?
Take a load of clay, put it in the hands of a sculptor, and she'll turn it into art. Hand the clay over to a potter instead, and he'll craft it into pitchers or mugs. Give the clay to a bunch of chefs experimenting with some weird combination of cutting-edge cuisine and Neolithic cooking methods and they'll layer it over the top of a pit in which they're roasting grasshoppers wrapped in banana leaves with emulsions of artichoke foam or something.
The differences have little to do with the clay; they have everything to do with those using it, their goals and intentions and methods.
Mind you, preachers sometimes do it too.
Okay with a conventional novel, one can critique it as to character development, plot, pacing, register/tone, and so forth, and (unlike wine reviews) other readers will know roughly what you mean. It moved too slowly. The main character was two-dimensional. It plodded and nothing happened for long stretches. Much of the prose thudded. And so on.
In one of these groundbreaking modernist uncoventional alinear etc etc etc novels, is it possible to critique them? It is entirely gestalt? It hits you or it doesn't? Or is there anything you can grab onto and say this aspect was lacking in some way? If the answer is no, then it seems it's not so much art as anti-art, a slap in the reader's face.
However, and this was my point about laws of physics and planets, clearly this isn't the rule many speakers are using. They consistently say "I am going into town" but also "Me and John are going into town".
That's why we talked about other rules that people might be following; we raised the possibility that it was a matter of complex and simple subjects, but in the end the rule which best described the widest range of usages was marked and unmarked forms. That's what linguists do; they observe actual utterances and analyse them to find the underlying rules speech communities actually use.
I don't think that means anything.
You've decided to die on a "correct English" hill and you'll keep fighting even when it is demonstrably gibberish.
Well done.
Ulysses doesn't work for everyone. The early chapters don't work for me. The later ones do. That's ok.
Certainly the form most people would produce so yes.
Put it down to lack of education about dialect. Also snobbery.
But it is "correct" within that dialect.
"Aah, gyal, yah tink seh mi a ramp wid yuh?"
(Girl, you think I'm messing around with you?).
Lots of interesting details here, e.g., the /y/ in 'gyal', like some Irish dialects, but anyway, 'mi' is I. I am guessing that many Caribbean dialects/creoles use me and him in subject position.