I do wonder why the English language derived the meaning of 'an abstraction of' from μετά

Is there a Language.SE?

English.SE is the next closest

Not close enough.

This is more about Greek than it is about English.

Unless there's an Etymology.SE

I say it'd fit

to ze Area 51

@ArdaXi part of English.SE

@badp Yeah, well, who made you the judge of what goes where?

@ArdaXi You're asking why English is doing something

yknow it's the subject

anyway feel free to not ask your question for the next six months while you get a new SE started up, or fail to.

and Etymology is specifically on topic there

← 14 messages moved from The Bridge

@ArdaXi If you don't ask that question I will

in the usual rep-seeking fashion ;-)

@Arda: See this topic: english.stackexchange.com/questions/8432/meaning-of-meta

@Charles: I have added another answer to your question.

I don't expect to find style guides explicitly saying it is OK. I'm surprised to see no discussion of formal usage mention the possibility at all.

@Charles: What do you mean exactly by "...no discussion of formal usage mention the possibility at all."?

Oh, you mean discussion in style guides?

Fowler documents some acc. who in Shakespeare, e.g., Who I my selfe struck downe (MacBeth).

@Cerberus Style guides are what I know best. I don't happen to own CGEL.

Why I use it: it was a slight tidying up of the personal preferences that an expensive education didn't wash out of me, and I realised solved some issues in the whole overformal vs. sloppy usage. I only started thinking about it for the first time in over a decade after a linguist commented on it, and wondered if it was common. I have noticed some other people use it.

I am in the process of consulting the CGEL (I assume you do don't have it on hand).

It seems I can't find it... where did I put it...

Why I find the morphological argument weak: there is precisely one relative pronoun that makes any case distinctions at all. Likewise interrogative pronouns. These pronouns are put to more complex use than other pronouns. Case is barely coherent in discussions of English anyway.

@Cerberus Thanks for searching.

Well, the other pronouns do have the distinction nominative v. non-nominative.

And I believe the Romance languages also went through a nominative-objective phase before losing all cases outside pronouns.

The same probably applies to Greek.

If I'm not being dense, personal pronouns have case, but relative pronouns -outside who- don't.

The alarm, which I bought yesterday, rang vs. The alarm, upon which I rely, rang.