David Pollack of New York has a question about comparative grammar. Why is it, he asks, that in English, if you knock on a door and are asked who you are, you instinctively answer “It’s me” even though grammar would seem to demand that you say “It’s I,” while in Hebrew you instinctively answer “Zeh ani” and would never dream of saying “Zeh oti”? (Ani is “I” in Hebrew and oti is its accusative form, like English “me.”)
One could, of course, seek to dismiss Mr. Pollack’s question as looking for logic where none need exist. Grammar is not a system that is foolproof. Many languages feature the occasional odd usage that seems to violate their own grammatical rules, and if “It’s me” might be a striking example of this in English, Hebrew has examples of its own. Such things don’t necessarily have rhyme or reason.
But this would be taking the easy way out. Exceptions to obvious grammatical rules often involve other, hidden rules that should be searched for before concluding that they do not exist. Indeed, there would appear to be a good reason that English speakers say “It’s me” and Hebrew speakers say “Zeh ani.” In English, the hidden rule is that the nominative pronoun “I” must always be followed by a verb, as in “I go,” “I am,” etc., and that when it isn’t, it changes to “me.” This happens in other situations, besides when knocking on a door. Ask a group of children, “Who wants a piece of candy?” and the answer is “Me,” not “I.” (Unless, that is, it is “I do” or “I want one.”) Wrongly told by someone that he saw you at the opera last night, you say, “That wasn’t me,” not “That wasn’t I.”
In Hebrew, on the other hand, no such rule could possibly exist, there being a common situation in which the pronoun ani never can be followed by a verb. This is because Hebrew has no copula, or present-tense form of the verb “to be,” so that “I am hungry,” for example, is the verbless ani ra’ev, “You are a woman” is at isha, and so on. To say “Zeh ani,” or simply “Ani,” when asked who is there by the person behind the door is thus entirely natural, since ani means “I am,” as well as “I.”
To which Mr. Pollack might object: But what about other languages, such as all European ones, that do have a present-tense form of “to be”? Why don’t they have the same hidden rule that English has?
Actually, many, if not all of them, do. One of them even follows the same door-knocker’s usage that English does. This is French, in which one also answers “C’est moi,” “It’s me,” to the question “Who is it?” In fact, French is far more inflexible in this respect, since saying “C’est je,” “It’s I,” would do more than make the speaker sound like a schoolmarm, as it would in English — it would make him incomprehensible. C’est je is as outlandish in French as zeh oti is in Hebrew.
And why doesn’t one say “It’s me” rather than “It’s I” in other European languages? The answer is, because those languages don’t use the “it’s” construction. They have different ways of telling the person behind the door who is knocking, all of which supply a copula for the pronoun “I.” Ask an Italian “Chi è?” and he will answer, “Sono io,” “I am.” Ask “Quièn es?” in Spanish, and you will get the same response: “Soy yo.” Ask a German. and you’ll be told, “Ich bin es” — “I am it.” In none of these cases is the first-person nominative pronoun made to stand without a verb, as it is in English “It is I.”
Still, English, I must admit, tends to use “me” in a nominative sense more than does Italian, Spanish, or German, in which children asked who wants a piece of candy would naturally answer “io,” “yo,” or “ich.” This is due, I suspect, to the influence of French, whose tendency to use moi nominatively, as we have seen, is even stronger than the parallel case in English. A phrase like “John and I are good friends” in French is “Jean et moi nous sommes des bons amis,” and it is quite common for French speakers to put moi and je together at the beginning of sentences for emphasis, as in “Moi, je veux manger,” “I want to eat,” or “Moi, je ne l’aime ça pas de tout,” “I don’t like that one bit.” This is an old feature of French, with which some of you may be familiar from the well-known medieval love ballad “A La Claire Fontaine,” with its lines “Tu a le coeur á rire, Moi, je l’ai a pleurer,” “You have a heart for laughing, I have one for crying.”
In any case, if anyone still feels guilty for saying “It’s me” because your fourth-grade English teacher told you that it’s wrong, it’s time to get over it. “It’s me” is perfectly good grammatical English. English grammar just isn’t what your fourth-grade teacher thought it was.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.
“Moi, je ne l’aime ça pas de tout,” is not french ; you have to say : moi, je n'aime pas ça du tout.
Do other English nominative pronouns also require a verb? As a child, I was told that when answering the phone, and finding that the caller wanted to speak to me, I was to say, "This is she." Which was usually followed by a pause on the other end, as the caller tried to figure out what I meant. Which was, "It's me."
In my experience, in anything to do with language, it comes down not to logic, but to what sounds right. "Zeh ani" sounds right, "Zeh oti" doesn't. For the same reason, we say "Aren't I?" rather than "Amn't I?" I once found myself, two weeks into a visit to Norway, asking a Norwegian ice-cream seller, "Kan ja ha eien til?", meaning "Can I have another one?" but literally translated as "Can I have one to?", which corresponds to the form of no other language I know. To my delight, it turned out to be correct – because in Norwegian, it sounds right.
hi good morning.. thanx for giving such type of information. i din't this side of "It's me" it is new for me. thanx once again.
Actually, אני can be followed by a verb. Because Hebrew verbs indicate gender, number, and person, in most instances the pronoun is dropped, like in Spanish. It is also logically assumed that when a speaker uses first person singular, the verb refers to the speaker. However, because Hebrew present tense verbs do not distinguish first person [ I ] from third person [he/she/it], in writing the pronoun frequently is used with the verb, unless the context indicates person. Also, אני —or any other pronoun— may be used with the verb for emphasis [as in Spanish], e.g., אני הולך, _yo_ voy, [but in English, I _am_ going]. As for why doesn’t one say “It’s me” rather than “It’s I” in other European languages, in Danish [and Norwegian] it is grammatical to say "det er mig" [it is me]. I suspect the other Scandinavian languages may be similar.
Addendum to the above: After some consideration, I realized I misplaced the emphasis in the English phase "I am going." It should have been "_I_ am going" or "_I'm_ going."
My college roommate, whose ancestors had been French-Canadian, liked to jokingly reply whenever someone referred to his heritage, "How could you tell I am French, me?"
Oh, woe is I! I shoulda read this sooner. I coulda put in the first insightful comment! That coulda been I! There are many schoolmarm rules in English which come from Latin--medieval grammarians assumed that Latin was the finest language, so the closer that English could be forced into the mold of Latin, the better for English. "Never end a sentence/clause with a preposition" and "never split an infinitive" are two particularly egregious violations of natural English grammar that have been forced down the throats of generations English-speaking school children, fortunately to no avail. These are natural rules in Latin; one cannot split an infinitive in Latin--they are single words. Trying to force one language into the mold of another is simply weird.