Re: Pronoun Clitic Development in English?

On 2025-05-27, Grimble Crumble <grimblecrumble870@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been learning Spanish, and I've noticed a parallel between my southern
dialect and Spanish. My theory is that English is developing a system of
pronoun clitics similar to Spanish.

You have sighted the tip of a small iceberg.  English has some fifty
single-syllable function words that come in strong and weak forms.
The weak forms are unstressed and, in accordance with English
phonotactics, drop any initial /h/.  The list includes most personal
pronouns.  As you already noted, synchronically "'em" /əm/ serves
as a weak form of "them" /ðɛm/, alongside /ðəm/, although diachronically
"'em" is not a reduced form of "them".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_and_vowel_reduction_in_English#Weak_and_strong_forms_of_function_words

Pronoun clitics are a common feature of the Romance languages, which, like
English, have shifted from more synthetic to more analytic syntax.

Clitic pronouns are widespread and also occur in languages described
as synthetic, e.g. Slovene, Czech, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit.  While
absent from Classical Latin, the pan-Romance distribution of clitic
personal pronouns suggests that the development must have already
started in Vulgar Latin.

What makes English fairly unique is that our nominative pronouns (I, he,
she, we, etc.) constitute a special, dependent class. Perhaps “clitic”

What _is_ unusual, from a Standard Average European point of view,
is that English cliticizes verbs (copula, auxiliary, modal) to
subject pronouns: I am > I'm, I will > I'll, etc.

  What's that?          "is"
  What's he done now?   "has"; also note the weak/enclitic "he"
  What's that do?       "does"

isn’t quite the right word, but these pronouns usually are awkward when
used in isolation (except in very formal contexts). For example, if I ask,
“Who did it?” you probably wouldn’t reply “He!”; instead, you’d say “He
did!” or (informally) “Him!” On the other hand, in Spanish, replying with
just "Él" to "¿Quién lo hizo?" feels perfectly natural, since nominative
pronouns are full tonics (can be used independently and be stressed) in
Spanish; only objective case pronouns in English serve this function in the
spoken language.

It's just that the subject pronouns in English are now largely
limited to marking the subject, while the default forms are the
object pronouns... but things become a lot more muddled when
coordination is in play: "Me and you went there", "between you and I".

In French, the subject pronouns are strictly cliticized to the verb
and independent pronouns have a separate form. In Spanish you might
have "¿quién? - yo", but in French "qui? - *je" is impossible and
you need "qui? - moi".  French uses its equivalent of the Spanish
prepositional pronouns (mí, tí) as independent pronouns.

Does my theory seem correct? Does your English dialect show this change?
Have linguists written about this?

I think in English the use of the weak forms is governed by prosody.
The use of the clitic pronouns in Romance is determined by grammar.
That is a significant difference.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de