I try to read posts carefully.

Johanna Rubba wrote:

> Read my post closely, please. I said 'rapidly disappearing', not 'has
> disappeared'.  I was also talking about speech, not writing--about the
> competence of children entering school. I suspect that, except after
> prepositions, most school kids would have to be taught rules for when to
> use 'whom'.

Here is the entire sentence which made the claim about the "who/whom" distinction
"rapidly disappearing."

>  Since this [standard]
> English changes, children often have to be taught things that the
> conservative school grammar wants to retain, but which has been lost in
> their home version of English (such as the 'who/whom' distinction,
> rapidly disappearing even from middle-class English).

My "misreading" of the comments in parentheses has to do with what "rapidly
disappearing" means.  I took it to mean that no one has a clear understanding of
when to use who and when to use whom.   I noted that there are some very clear
grammatical environments in which speakers of "middle-class English" use whom and
never use who.  That such environments still exists is evidence that speakers of
English are making a very clear distinction between who and whom. I have no data
about non-standard dialects of English and what happens in those environments, but
I suspect whom is used.

By the way, I have never seen an exercise which teaches any native speaker of
English that whom in the following sentence is obligatory.

1)  All the students, several of whom must still take the test, went to lunch.

This raises a very interesting question about acquisition.  How does a child who is
not exposed to whom learn to use it in those environments in which it is
obligatory?

This discussion has been about who/whom, so the following observation about "case"
must refer only to "whom".

> I'm willing to bet that 'whom' appears ONLY after prepositions in the
> speech of most younger people. The preposition is the cue that 'whom'
> must be used; there is no sense of case. These are, essentially, frozen
> constructions. If there were  a sense of case, 'whom' would be being
> used a lot more in speech and in 'who do you trust' type situations.

The nature of case (the notion of whether a particular noun phrase is functioning
as a subject or an object) is very abstract in English.  Only pronouns in English
have overt marking for case (the difference between I, he/she, we, they and me,
him/her, us, them).   This is unlike German, which has four different cases and has
every noun phrase marked for case in some manner.

Despite the abstract nature of case marking in English,  it would not be true to
say that English speakers have "no sense of case" [period].  In fact, English
speakers must know a lot about case.  If they didn't, we would expect to see much
more variation in pronoun usage than we do.  Consider the previous sentence.  I
know of no dialect of English that would use them or us in place of they or we.

The variation in pronoun usage that we do observe can be accounted for because of
certain conflicts with other principles of English.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

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