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Actually, the more natural construction in English would be "me and my siblings". The only reason people know about "X and I" is due to prescriptivism. Noam Cho
by maxdamantus 8y ago
Actually, the more natural construction in English would be "me and my siblings". The only reason people know about "X and I" is due to prescriptivism. Noam Chomsky for example sometimes uses this example: https://chomsky.info/1991____/ https://chomsky.info/1991____/ (search "him and me").
In general in English, you have a one-to-one correspondence between a finite verb and a subject noun phrase. When the noun phrase is just a single pronoun, you have formal agreement between the verb and that pronoun ("(I) am here", but not "(Everyone who knows I) am here"). Subject pronouns are not used in other cases.
Regardless of some technical explanation of why the "and I" construction is unnatural, some pretty good evidence would include the fact that people have to keep teaching it to successive generations, and the fact that "I and he" sounds undesirable even to people who have learnt the rule, whereas "him and me" and "me and him" both sound natural to someone who has learnt English naturally.
Perhaps we should also be telling people that prepositions are not things you can end sentences with.