On: Godot Engine open sourced

[xacaxulu]

Godot! Just what I've been waiting for!

[sjwright → xacaxulu]

Haha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot

(P.S. not what, but who.)

[pavlov → sjwright]

More pedantically, shouldn't that be "just whom I've been waiting for"?

[einhverfr → pavlov]

Edward Sapir says no ;-) In fact he devoted significant space in his 1912 book "Language" to the death of "whom."

[stavros → einhverfr]

Pff, descriptivists.

[raverbashing → einhverfr]

German maintains the difference (and a lot of other stuff), but yeah, as a substitute for the direct object it's pretty much dead. (Nobody says "Whom did that")

[bmm6o → raverbashing]

> Nobody says "Whom did that"

Also, nobody suggests doing so would be correct. In "who did that", "who" is the subject of "did" and takes the nominative case.

[einhverfr → raverbashing]

German still has a dative case. We lost our dative case in England around the time Middle English developed.

[raverbashing → einhverfr]

Yeah, but Whom is used in the indirect object case, as in "To whom does this belong"

[einhverfr → raverbashing]

Indirect object is similar to dative, sort of.

Seriously, most people would say "Who does this belong to?" We can argue whether it is good style or not, but descriptively it is standard grammar.

[thesz → einhverfr]

Googling "to whom it may concern" returns ~2050000 results, "to who it may concern" returns four time as less results (~479000).

You are not right.

[lutusp → thesz]

> Googling "to whom it may concern" returns ~2050000 results, "to who it may concern" returns four time as less results (~479000).

"Four times as less" -> "four times fewer" or "one-fourth" ??

[einhverfr → lutusp]

"To whom it may concern" is formulaic though, just like "Dear Mr. President."

Those are words used as they are, verbatem, in a specific context. They are thus ossified and preserved in a much more conservative state than the rest of the language.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that even as our language changes, that phrase will continue to remain intact in root and morphology even if the morphology disappears elsewhere.

[bjt → einhverfr]

Thank you! Your Sapir reference led me to Googling "sapir whom", which led me to http://www.bartleby.com/186/7.html. Paragraph 10 is where his "whom" discussion starts. Good reading.

[pavlov → einhverfr]

Oh well! My humble self standeth corrected.

Anyway, we should not forget that Beckett wrote Godot in French, so the correct form is:

"Godot! Exactement celui que j'attendais!"

[irremediable → pavlov]

IMO if you're going to be that pedantic, it doesn't sound right to end on a preposition.

[taylorwc → irremediable]

You're right, a preposition is never a good thing to end on. It's one of those rules that people seem to never abide by...

[vram22 → xacaxulu]

I just can't wait for Godot.