Need Some (Grammatical) Relationship Advice

I believe that "had" is an auxiliary verb showing obligation, and "to be" is the main verb. I agree about "him", but there are other valid opinions.

This site calls "had" one past tense version of "must". If you search around, then you may find other explanations.
http://speakspeak.com/resources/english-grammar-rules/modal-verbs/must-have-to

mwierenga said:

King Neptune,
Thank you so much! This is helpful stuff!

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You are more than welcome. I am curious as to what others might call that construction.

English, unlike many languages, usually requires the predicate of "to be" to take an accusative/oblique form.

"It is him" rather than "It is he" (which I think is still possible but much less common).

This is here further enforced by the fact that you're dealing with an infinitive proposition (a verb whose predicate is another, infinitive verb, which may itself have a subject and a predicate distinct from that of the conjugate verb), which would require the subject of the infinitive verb to be in the accusative form anyway.

See:

"He knows" > "I want him to know." Even though "him" is the subject of "know", the peculiar syntax requires it to be in the accusative.

Although in your sentence, the conjugated verb and the infinitive verb have the same subject, "it" (compare "I want to know" where "I" is subject to both "want" and "know"); but the principle that the predicate of "to be" usually is in the accusative still applies.

Not sure about the construction, but here are some thoughts. I know that the meaning of "It had to be him/he" is different than "It is him/he." But if it had to be him/he, then isn't it true that it *is* him/he? And I was taught that with the construction [something] + [a form of the verb to be] + [a pronoun], it is correct to use pronouns such as I, she, and he, not me, her, and him. So, what I wrote above should have said "It is he."

I was taught that when I pick up the phone and someone says, "May I speak to Amy?" my response should be, "This is she." And that it would be incorrect for me to say, "This is her." Even though when I was in school, all my friends would say, "This is her" when I would call them. I think one runs the risk of sounding overly sophisticated/snobbish if she says, "This is she," especially when her friends don't talk that way. I suppose I could have said, "It is I," but that probably would have sounded even worse. Ack, what's a young girl to do? (Actually, my friends didn't say, "May I speak to Amy?" They said, "Is Amy there?" Mom taught me differently.) As an adult, I started saying, "This is Amy." Eliminates the risk of sounding like I'm using bad grammar to people who think I should say "This is she," while removing the risk of sounding like a snob to people who think I should say, "This is her."

So, if I had your sentence in something I was writing, I'd probably just try to find a different way to say it, and avoid the problem that way.

The idea that "it is I" is more correct than "it is me" seems to be another case of zealous English teachers and grammarian forcing Latin grammar rules upon English.

When Latin does this, and English does that, instead of simply and logically concluding that "Latin and English do things differently", a lot of people seem to reach the strange conclusion that "English is wrong and should do things more like Latin".

So this seems to be just another version of the canard against split-infinitives.

In any case, "it is me" is a centuries old structure that wasn't contested before the mid-18 th century —and yet in spite of these protestations, people haven't stopped using it.

TheNighSwan said:

The idea that "it is I" is more correct than "it is me" seems to be another case of zealous English teachers and grammarian forcing Latin grammar rules upon English.

When Latin does this, and English does that, instead of simply and logically concluding that "Latin and English do things differently", a lot of people seem to reach the strange conclusion that "English is wrong and should do things more like Latin".

So this seems to be just another version of the canard against split-infinitives.

In any case, "it is me" is a centuries old structure that wasn't contested before the mid-18 th century —and yet in spite of these protestations, people haven't stopped using it.

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To be verbs taking a nominative object is as Germanic as it is Latin (if it's Latin at all). Making that mistake in any language other than English flags you as a bit Captain Caveman.
Don't get me wrong, "it is I" sounds stupid to my ear as well, but I detest people putting aspects of grammar down to "zealous English teachers and Grammarians" when they're as integral to the language as our verb conjugation.

That doesn't really change my point: "it is me" is the correct structure in English and can only be contested by making a reference to what other languages do.

It is true that many European languages (including most Germanic languages) write "it is I"; but seldom is the grammar of English compared to that of other Germanic languages; it is however very frequently compared to that Latin.

For that matter, French here follows English: you write "c'est moi", not "c'est je" (not even in formal writing, the second sentence would be considered a second language speaker's mistake by any native French person) —so if we're going to judge English usage by reference to other languages, there is in fact plenty of precedent for "it is me".

TheNighSwan said:

That doesn't really change my point: "it is me" is the correct structure in English and can only be contested by making a reference to what other languages do.

It is true that many European languages (including most Germanic languages) write "it is I"; but seldom is the grammar of English compared to that of other Germanic languages; it is however very frequently compared to that Latin.

For that matter, French here follows English: you write "c'est moi", not "c'est je" (not even in formal writing, the second sentence would be considered a second language speaker's mistake by any native French person) —so if we're going to judge English usage by reference to other languages, there is in fact plenty of precedent for "it is me".

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English, as a Germanic language, has Germanic grammar; that's why "it is I" is argued to be correct. It has nothing to do with people trying to fit the square peg of Latin grammar into the round hole of the English language.

I don't care about people saying "it's me" as opposed to "it's I"; I say it. My issue is with people latching on to the proverbial victorian grammarians who are blamed for every uncomfortable grammatical convention.

NRoach said:

To be verbs taking a nominative object is as Germanic as it is Latin (if it's Latin at all). Making that mistake in any language other than English flags you as a bit Captain Caveman.
Don't get me wrong, "it is I" sounds stupid to my ear as well, but I detest people putting aspects of grammar down to "zealous English teachers and Grammarians" when they're as integral to the language as our verb conjugation.

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"C'est moi" is perfectly good French. One would ever think of saying "c'est je". I wouldn't be surprised if the use of "me" in "it's me" was borrowed from the French.

NRoach said:

English, as a Germanic language, has Germanic grammar; that's why "it is I" is argued to be correct. It has nothing to do with people trying to fit the square peg of Latin grammar into the round hole of the English language.

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"Germanic grammar" is not a thing; different Germanic languages do the same things differently, and English as a general tendency does them more differently than other languages between them.

All the Germanic languages follow a variation of the V2 word order rule. Except English

All the Germanic languages have grammatical gender. Except English and Afrikaans.

All the Germanic languages have inflected adjectives. Except English.

And my point is that people who make prescriptive statements about the grammar of English do not make these in reference to other Germanic languages, they make them in reference to the grammar of Latin, from which comes such things as the "no split-infinitive" rule.

I don't see how I can state that any more clearly.


The kicker: "It is me" is possible (though alongside "It is I") in Danish, Norwegian and some Swedish dialects (my source on this is a native Swedish speaker).

TheNighSwan said:

"Germanic grammar" is not a thing; different Germanic languages do the same things differently, and English as a general tendency does them more differently than other languages between them.

All the Germanic languages follow a variation of the V2 word order rule. Except English

All the Germanic languages have grammatical gender. Except English and Afrikaans.

All the Germanic languages have inflected adjectives. Except English.

And my point is that people who make prescriptive statements about the grammar of English do not make these in reference to other Germanic languages, they make them in reference to the grammar of Latin, from which comes such things as the "no split-infinitive" rule.

I don't see how I can state that any more clearly.

The kicker: "It is me" is possible (though alongside "It is I") in Danish, Norwegian and some Swedish dialects (my source on this is a native Swedish speaker).

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I'll give you that English doesn't follow V2 word order, but it most certainly does have grammatical gender (he went, she thought, it ran) and does inflect adjectives (thought admittedly only for comparison and superlatives).

My argument was that "it is I" needn't have anything to do with Latin; it has age old grounding in English and every other Germanic language.

TheNighSwan said:

The idea that "it is I" is more correct than "it is me" seems to be another case of zealous English teachers and grammarian forcing Latin grammar rules upon English.

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NRoach said:

I'll give you that English doesn't follow V2 word order, but it most certainly does have grammatical gender (he went, she thought, it ran) and does inflect adjectives (thought admittedly only for comparison and superlatives).

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English doesn't have grammatical gender. The term means that nouns have gender, even if the thing referred to does not. It's why "table" is common gender in Dutch, while "book" is neuter. (De tafel, het boek). Tables aren't particularly masculine or feminine, and there's nothing about a book that's neuter (nor a window, a face, a land, or a type of metal, all of which are neuter nouns in Dutch).

(Actually, English does have grammatical gender in that ships are always referred to as "she". But I can't think of any other examples.)

evilrooster said:

English doesn't have grammatical gender. The term means that nouns have gender, even if the thing referred to does not. It's why "table" is common gender in Dutch, while "book" is neuter. (De tafel, het boek). Tables aren't particularly masculine or feminine, and there's nothing about a book that's neuter (nor a window, a face, a land, or a type of metal, all of which are neuter nouns in Dutch).

(Actually, English does have grammatical gender in that ships are always referred to as "she". But I can't think of any other examples.)

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Some nouns in English do have gender, but even the few that remain are being driven out. Examples include actress-actor, executor-executrix, host-hostess, etc.

King Neptune said:

Some nouns in English do have gender, but even the few that remain are being driven out. Examples include actress-actor, executor-executrix, host-hostess, etc.

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But those refer to the gender of the thing named. That's not the same as how every mouth (la bouche) in French is gramatically feminine, whether belonging to a man or a woman.

Arnold Schwartzenegger's hand is feminine (la maine). Marilyn Monroe's elbow was masculine (le coude). That's different than a woman being an actress and a man an actor.

never mind

King Neptune said:

No, the gender of those words are reflections of the sexes of the persons involved; people do not have gender.

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What? People most certainly do have gender. It's their inner sense of being male/female/other, which may or may not match their body's sex.

So you were just considering the gender of words that have gender that does not correspond to the sex of the person or animal; such words are not common in most languages, but a few remain in English; although most have been tossed out are uselessor inane.

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No, "such words" are all over languages with grammatical gender. Every word in languages like French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Latin, and Greek has a gender: it's masculine, feminine, common (a peculiarity of Dutch), or neuter. So all body part words in those languages have a gender, because they're words in a grammatically gendered language. But since they don't change gender depending on which sex or gender of person they're part of, that means that men have feminine-noun body parts, women have masculine-noun body parts...and everyone may also have neuter-noun body parts.

And they're not "useless or inane"; they're the ordinary, everyday words for those body parts. Just as in Spanish word for "table" is feminine and the word for "river" is masculine, not to be a puzzlement, but just because that's how the language works.

Out of curiosity, what languages do you speak/have you studied?

Consider ships and certain kinds of machinery. In English all ships are of the feminine gender. Countries and oceans are also referred to in the feminine.

The thing about gender in English is that nouns and pronouns have gender, but adjectives do not, so there is nothing that has to agree in gender.

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I did already mention ships as one of the few examples of grammatically gendered nouns left in English. But, as you say, because our adjectives do not reflect the genders of the nouns they modify, you can only tell in certain circumstances (e.g. pronoun choice: "She's a good ship.")

King Neptune said:

Some nouns in English do have gender, but even the few that remain are being driven out.

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Although these nouns may on the way "out" as a pair, many writers still regard blond/blonde as masculine and feminine, as in "George is a blond" and "Georgette is a blonde."

Chase said:

Although these nouns may on the way "out" as a pair, many writers still regard blond/blonde as masculine and feminine, as in "George is a blond" and "Georgette is a blonde."

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I first heard of that difference with the last few months (less than a year anyway). I'm only about 95% certain that that differentiation didn't exist until recently, so it could be that gender is being returned to adjectives, but that would mean adding inflections, and that would not be fun.

Never mind

King Neptune said:

That is a neologism that didn't not add anything to the language, and it was only introduced in some countries.

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It dates back to before my lifetime, certainly, and I'm not young. It's here now. And I'd strongly dispute that it doesn't add anything to the language, but the details of such a dispute don't really belong in this room. So let me just say that your view on it is not universal or normative.

No, "such words" are all over languages with grammatical gender. Every word in languages like French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Latin, and Greek has a gender: it's masculine, feminine, common (a peculiarity of Dutch), or neuter. So all body part words in those languages have a gender, because they're words in a grammatically gendered language. But since they don't change gender depending on which sex or gender of person they're part of, that means that men have feminine-noun body parts, women have masculine-noun body parts...and everyone may also have neuter-noun body parts.

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But they are not in English, which is one of the few Indo-European languages that has mostly dropped gender. I believe that Armenian has also dropped gender from nouns.

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Yes, but since we were discussing grammatical gender, I was providing examples from languages that do have it to contrast to English.

Is there any useful reason for making a difference of genders for nouns? It makes no difference to me whether "doctor-id" is masculine or feminine or neuter. It is third declension masculine, but that does not tell me anything about any particular teacher.

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I don't know why so many languages have grammatical genders. I'm simply observing that they do, and explaining that it's not as simple as words that specifically refer to either the gender or the sex of the person described.

Latin and French

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Huh. I'm surprised that you didn't grasp my examples, given that.

Whether the use of gender is useful is purely a matter of opinion. Gender of nouns does not provide information; it simply adds a complication.

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If I'm speaking a language with grammatical gender, then to speak it correctly, I have to use the genders of the nouns. It's not really optional.

evilrooster said:

Yes, but since we were discussing grammatical gender, I was providing examples from languages that do have it to contrast to English.


I don't know why so many languages have grammatical genders. I'm simply observing that they do, and explaining that it's not as simple as words that specifically refer to either the gender or the sex of the person described.

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Yes, and I was simply observing that that's not how it is in English.

Huh. I'm surprised that you didn't grasp my examples, given that.

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I understood the examples, but I was working with the English language, in which things are a little different.

If I'm speaking a language with grammatical gender, then to speak it correctly, I have to use the genders of the nouns. It's not really optional.

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Yes, and if you are using a language with extremely limited grammatical gander, then gender is not an issue. In English there are only a few nouns that have gender, and even fewer adjectives have gender.

It makes me wonder why there was gender for all nouns. As I mentioned, it does not add to the meaning, and it adds an unnecessary complication.

Grammatical gender has plenty of functions.

It opens an additional derivative dimensions (French has many nouns which differ only by gender, with the same underlying root but a difference in meaning: grain vs graine, port vs porte, arc vs arche, point vs pointe, jour vs journée, an vs année, etc).

It ties nouns and adjective together and thus free up word order (gender agreement is a lot of what allows Latin and Greek poetry to have such extremely wild word order — because the adjective might end up at the other end of the sentence from its noun, but thanks to gender (and case) you still know which noun it goes with).

When talking about multiple objects, it makes pronoun usage smoother (since you don't have to uniformously refer to all the object as "it").

In some languages with an advanced level of verbal indexation (the verb agrees not only with the subject, but also with the object and/or the indirect object), this allows for a Latin-level of freedom in word order without requiring noun declensions.


Grammatical gender persists in hundreds of languages in many distinct language families. It wouldn't be the case if it was useless.

King Neptune said:

Yes, and I was simply observing that that's not how it is in English.

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If that is so, than is a tad confusing:

So you were just considering the gender of words that have gender that does not correspond to the sex of the person or animal; such words are not common in most languages, but a few remain in English; although most have been tossed out are uselessor inane.

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If things/people are conceptually gendered in a culture, then the language will have ways to refer to that. English has gendered pronouns, and gendered suffixes, yes. Grammatical gender is related, but different:

It means that gender is encoded in the grammar. For example, the German noun-system has three genders: neuter, feminine and masculine. Every noun has to fall into one of these categories or you'll run into problems when you're trying to use it (which sometimes happens when you try to use foreign nouns).

Adjectives don't have gender. They inflect for gender, and the relevant gender is the gender of the noun they modify.

Grammatical gender and cultural gender can have complex interplay. A real life example from my own language use (I'm a native speaker of German):

In German the noun for girl is "Mädchen". Because of the diminutive suffix "-chen", the word is neuter. This does not mean that I think of girls as genderless. However, grammar forces me to treat the noun as such.

Now, here's the interesting thing. Because the noun "Mädchen" is neuter, it requires a neuter article "Das Mädchen", rather than "Die Mädchen." I find "das Mädchen" absolutely unexceptional. It's how the language is. It doesn't bother me at all. I recoil from "die Mädchen". It feels just wrong. So far as expected, but:

Grammar also suggests I should use the neuter pronoun "es" rather than "sie", when referring to the noun. And I can't stand that. I naturally use "sie" (the feminine pronoun), and I actively resist using "es". "Es" looks wrong (even though it's perfectly grammatical, and logically the only correct way to speak) to me.

To summarise: I recoil from referring to "Das Mädchen" as "es". I accept grammatical gender when it comes to articles, but not when it comes to pronouns? Why? What's the difference?

I'm not sure I'd consider ships getting feminine pronouns as an instance of grammatical gender. I tend to think of this more as instances of personification (like how the sun can be masculine in poetry).

What both the ship-example and the Mädchen-example have in common is that they're about pronouns, and I think it might be a question of reference: people may sometimes override grammatical gender for conceptual gender in pronoun reference (as I do when I refer to a "Mädchen" as "sie", while I'd always refer to a "Bübchen" [diminutive for boy] as "es"). I think the same goes for ships and feminine pronouns or personification in poetry. Which is why I think pronoun-substitution is less useful as evidence for grammatical gender than articles or nominal/adjectival inflection.

Suffixes that specifically express gender (-or/-ress) express cultural gender not grammatical gender. To what extent grammatical gender expresses cultural gender is an interesting topic in its own right. But to ask that question we must keep the concepts separate, at least analytically.