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The STATEMENT MADE BY NATIVES:

be is not transitive, that’s why “Whom can he be?” and “Who can be him?” are wrong.

If it’s true, why is this correct?

I don’t want to be him.

My first language is not English and the two makes perfect sense in my language and mean different things.

1 Who can be him? = (Who is able among all these people to be him?)
2 Whom can he be? = (Which person (whom) of all these people is he able to be?)

Do you confirm that 1 and 2 are wrong? If you do confirm that, then we are left with these:

Who can be he? – who is the subject. (Who can be Jack?)

Who can he be? – he is the subject (Who can Jack be?)

Do you agree that the difference in meaning should be conveyed through the word order if the objective case of pronouns is not allowed to be used?

user1425
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    Perhaps a better example is "Who is he?"/"Who is him?" In the first, it's a direct equivalent; an identity (in the technical sence of identical). The second might be said of an actor: "OK. Now for Prince Hal. Who is him?" as in "Who is playing him?" Be has been around so long that it has accreted colloquialisms. – Andrew Leach May 02 '21 at 09:02
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    When I was learning Latin many moons ago, I was taught that if you say "A is B" (A B est), the nouns are in apposition and must be in the same case. I know we're not supposed to apply the rules of Latin to English, but Whom can he be? doesn't seem like a valid sentence to me. I agree with Andrew that Who can be [him]? only makes sense if you understand be as a colloquialism for play the part of. – Kate Bunting May 02 '21 at 09:20
  • @Kate Bunting. - I want to be him! - Whom do I want to be? - Correct or not? – user1425 May 02 '21 at 09:23
  • OK, I grant you that one - but "There's a man coming to the front door. Who can he be?" – Kate Bunting May 02 '21 at 09:35
  • Kate, thank you, but it's not a personal campaign of mine, I want to learn how it works. It doesn't fit into one box of simple rules. There must be a reason why "Whom do I want to be?" and "Who can he be?" work differently. I hope this one is wrong in your opinion ""There's a man coming to the front door. Who can be he ?" – user1425 May 02 '21 at 09:44
  • I think you should restrict your question to either word order ("Who can be he?") or case ("Who can be him?"). – Andrew Leach May 02 '21 at 10:05
  • 'Be' in sentences such as 'He is king', 'He is a Brit', and 'He is cold' use be as a copular verb rather than a transitive or intransitive verb. The copula links subject and complement (not object). – Edwin Ashworth May 02 '21 at 14:46

2 Answers2

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Let's be clear about one thing. Latin and Greek are strongly inflected languages. Their nouns and adjectives have different forms not just for plural and singular, but for the roles of subject (nominative), addressee (vocative), possession/origin (genitive); interest (dative); and agent/cause/source/origin (ablative -) Latin only (represented by genitive in Greek. Most of these have disappeared from most modern European languages (except Latin, preserved in the aspic of the Vatican). In English, some pronouns inflect slightly, and the usage has loosened in my lifetime. Even now it has not stabilised.

The reason why you find inconsistency is that language, as ever, is evolving through the reproductive process of usage. Just like cell division, so with words, mistakes get made. Some of these do not matter and so can carry on, others die out. That process is accelerating. This is because the English language is no longer a function of the forces of the church, school, university and editing. Now just about anyone can 'publish', and in the process conversational language enters the written language.

So now my answer "It is I" your "who's there" sounds foolish or snobbish. The so called nominatives, 'I/he/she' look weird anywhere but immediately in front of a verb. Why? Because nobody uses it anywhere else. 'Whom' seems to be moribund except after a preposition. Even there, the growing preference for delayed prepositions may well be an instinctive 'whom'-avoidance mechanism.

All this is happening while governments (especially the British one) are pressing teachers to put the language back into some kind of regulated grammar box.

It makes like particularly hard for learners of English as a foreign language, because of the ubiquity of exceptions and special cases . But to our shame they manage far better with our rebellious tongue than we do with theirs.

Tuffy
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The STATEMENT MADE BY NATIVES:

Be is not transitive.

This part is correct. Be is certainly not a transitive verb; be is an auxiliary verb.

that’s why “Whom can he be?” and “Who can be him?” are wrong.

This may be a statement made by some natives, but it's wrong. And not all natives say it. So forget that part. And ignore those failed examples. They're wrong to start with, and don't exemplify anything.

So, the reason why I don’t want to be him is correct is not because be is transitive, but rather because him is the basic form of the 3rd person singular masculine pronoun. This may be surprising; many people have been told that he is the pronoun and him is for objects only. This is no longer true, if it ever was.

He is a special form used only for subjects of tensed clauses; any other (non-possessive) use gets him (similar remarks for the pronoun pairs me/I, her/she, us/we, and them/they). These used to be case-form variants, like German pronouns, but unlike German, English doesn't have cases for nouns at all, and they've pretty much disappeared in English pronouns, too.

That's why Him and me are gonna go together is a normal thing to say. Neither I nor he is really comfortable in a conjoined NP, so me and him pop up naturally. Similarly, when a pronoun is a predicate nominal, you get him, as in I wouldn't want to be him.

Of the examples given, neither (1) nor (2) are correct; (2) is ungrammatical, and (1) doesn't make sense unless the predicate be him is taken metaphorically, to refer (for instance) to an actor playing some historic figure:

  • What about Hitler? Who can be him?

The rest of the question is unclear; it makes too many assumptions.

John Lawler
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    Joseph Emonds in a 1985 paper described It is I as a "Grammatically deviant prestige construction". He was saying that it doesn't conform to the grammar of English, but only to an artificial high-prestige version of English, which was nobody's native language but always a learned form. – Colin Fine May 02 '21 at 20:37
  • Why is 2 ungrammatical? Whom do you want me to be? - PERFECTLY correct! But "Whom can you be?"- wrong.. Something doesn't add up! – user1425 May 03 '21 at 04:47