pre-nominal and post-nominal forms of the possessive (my father but father mine; it is my book but the book is mine)?  That this interpretation corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again indicated by the language of the folk.  The folk says it is me, not it is I, which is “correct” but just as falsely so as the whom did you see? that we have analyzed. I’m the one, it’s me; we’re the ones, it’s us that will win out—­such are the live parallelisms in English to-day.  There is little doubt that it is I will one day be as impossible in English as c’est je, for c’est moi, is now in French.

[Footnote 142:  Aside from the interrogative:  am I? is he? Emphasis counts for something.  There is a strong tendency for the old “objective” forms to bear a stronger stress than the “subjective” forms.  This is why the stress in locutions like He didn’t go, did he? and isn’t he? is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.]

How differently our I:  me feels than in Chaucer’s day is shown by the Chaucerian it am I.  Here the distinctively subjective aspect of the I was enough to influence the form of the preceding verb in spite of the introductory it; Chaucer’s locution clearly felt more like a Latin sum ego than a modern it is I or colloquial it is me.  We have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that the English personal pronouns have lost some share of their original syntactic force.  Were he and she subjective forms pure and simple, were they not striving, so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like man or any other noun, we should not have been able to coin such compounds as he-goat and she-goat, words that are psychologically analogous to bull-moose and mother-bear.  Again, in inquiring about a new-born baby, we ask Is it a he or a she? quite as though he and she were the equivalents of male and female or boy and girl.  All in all, we may conclude that our English case system is weaker than it looks and that, in one way or another, it is destined to get itself reduced to an absolutive (caseless) form for all nouns and pronouns but those that are animate.  Animate nouns and pronouns are sure to have distinctive possessive forms for an indefinitely long period.

Meanwhile observe that the old alignment of case forms is being invaded by two new categories—­a positional category (pre-verbal, post-verbal) and a classificatory category (animate, inanimate).  The facts that in the possessive animate nouns and pronouns are destined to be more and more sharply distinguished from inanimate nouns and pronouns (the man’s, but of the house; his, but of it) and that, on the whole, it is only