Have you ever wondered why we have two words–who and whom–both meaning the same thing. What is the difference? These two words are different cases of the same [pronoun, which are forms which provide clarity. Even people who don’t know how to define “case” notice the incorrect sound when a young child screams, “Me do it!” By school age most of us figure out that “I” is used for the subject of a verb, and “me” for the object. Cases are forms of nouns and pronouns, which clarify meaning.

Who and whom are similar; “who” is the subject and “whom” is the object. But, in American English we forget that. We tend to use who for both: Examples: “Who is there?” and “You hit who?” We relegate “whom” to indirect objects, such as, “To whom this applies.”

This leads to other questions: “Who added cases to our language?” You could blame it on empires. Greek and Latin are the languages of ancient empires and they both used various cases frequently. 

A sixth grade student approached me during a class silent reading period to ask a question. I allowed students to do this when stumped on the meaning of a word. Often they knew the word and just wanted to stretch their legs. However, one student’s question intrigued me. He asked if I could explain the genitive case to him. A basic class in Koine Greek allowed me to respond without thinking.

“It’s the possessive form of a word,” I explained. “If the book you’re reading belongs to Bill, it is Bill’s book. If it belongs to me, it is my book. ‘Bill’s’ and ‘my’ are the genitive case.”

He nodded with a look of comprehension, before the shock hit me. The boy was trying to stump me.

“Who taught you about language cases?” I asked with some suspicion.

“My dad’s teaching me Latin.” He grinned.

Koine Greek was the business form of the poetic literary Greek used by Homer. It spread through the conquests of Alexander the Great. Like the Greeks, the Romans had numerous cases in the language. The widespread use of the Roman alphabet indicates some of the reach of this huge empire. Fluency in Latin was the mark of higher education long after the time period and far beyond the geographic reach of the Roman Empire. 

Although Greece and Rome have left their mark on English, our language is Germanic at its roots. There was no written record of any Germanic languages before the Romans met the Goths. (That’s what happens no one speaking the language reads or writes.) So, understanding the development of the Germanic languages is based on the deductive linguistic work of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did more than collect fairy tales. 

Many current languages have far more cases than English. The romance languages of French and Spanish use them to indicate if words are subjects, objects, masculine, feminine, etc. When cases no longer serve a purpose we tend to drop them. But, until that time we will also not sound quite as civilized when other people still know the difference between who and whom.

Illustration: First encounter of Hernan Cortes with la Malinche at Duran Codex. National Library, Spain (Dreamstime.com)