Me, My, Mine
Me, my and mine are all that’s left of a family of related pronouns that once included terms like mec and mes. In Proto Indo European, the first person pronoun (the pronoun that referred to oneself) had two basic forms, eg and me: eg for subjects, me (pronounced “meh”) for the rest. Me also had various suffixes to indicate its case marking: me for accusative, mene or moi for the genitive, meghio or moi for the dative, moi for instrumental or locative, and med for ablative. If we still had those forms in modern English, we’d be saying things like this:
- Do you like me?
- That iPhone is mene; OR that iPhone is moi.
- Give meghio that iPhone; OR give moi that iPhone.
- John moved the couch with moi.
- Throw the stick to moi.
- Throw the stick away from med.
Me descended almost unchanged over 8000 years into English, but its variant forms dropped away — except for mene, which became mine, and moi, which became my.
All of these forms begin with manifestation. Me, the “default” and most common form, manifests long term stamina; this may be related to the fact that it is in the objective case, and therefore metaphorically is an object, which is a passive thing that endures the action of the subject. My, a determiner (like a and the) which serves to help pick out the noun it modifies, manifests expansive mind and art (it’s not clear to me what this has to do with possession). Mine, meanwhile, is a noun like me, and here the energy of my is narrowed to a specific target.
It’s fascinating that all these forms begin with the “m” of motherhood and manifestation. Does this serve to point up the notion that we, too, are “made” things, manifestations of something?
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December 29th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
What has phonosemantics to say about the Great Vowel Shift?