Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/49

34 me there and I to be in bed at the time?’ This latter part is merely a translation from the correct Irish:—agus meise do bheith mo luidhe ag an am sin (Irish Tale). Any number of examples of this usage might be culled from both English and Irish writings. Even so classical a writer as Wolfe follows this usage in ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’:—

‘We thought ... That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, And we far away on the billow.’

(I am reminded of this by Miss Hayden and Prof. Hartog.)

But there is a variety in our English use of the pronouns here, namely, that we often use the objective (or accusative) case instead of the nominative. ‘How could you expect Davy to do the work and him so very sick?’ ‘My poor man fell into the fire a Sunday night and him hearty’ (hearty, half drunk: Maxwell, ‘Wild Sports of the West’). ‘Is that what you lay out for me, mother, and me after turning the Voster’ (i.e. after working through the whole of Voster's Arithmetic: Carleton). ‘John and Bill were both reading and them eating their dinner’ (while they were eating their dinner). This is also from the Irish language. We will first take the third person plural pronoun. The pronoun 'they' is in Irish siad: and the accusative ‘them’ is the Irish iad. But in some Irish constructions this iad is (correctly) used as a nominative; and in imitation of this our people often use 'them' as a nominative:—‘Them are just the gloves I want.’ ‘Them are the boys’ is exactly translated from the correct Irish is