571: It Was Me Jul 1, 2016

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Basic grammar-skills are learned in infancy and early childhood and to (adult) native speakers it would be second nature. After years of knowing a language, certain things will feel wrong or out of place, such as hearing 'me' as the first word in a sentence, or 'I' as the last. It is for that reason that sentences like "he is smarter than me" or "it was me who made tea" might not make sense to a non-native speaker, since in both, 'me' is being used as the subject, but are generally understood in conversation. Some languages, such as German, though are not as lenient even colloquially, so "es war mich" (it was me) would not be automatically understood in the same way. The simple explanation for this is that the syntax of English words are determined by the position in a sentence, unlike German which has case-suffixes. For a refresher on case-endings, see Word Facts from June 25, 2016.

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