Annie writes:
I have a friend who adamantly believes that “Rachael and I’s friendship…” is correct English! My valiant attempts to explain the truth have failed. Please reply with an answer that she will perhaps believe due to the credibility of the source.
I have explained that “I is” is not proper and that if you take “Rachael” out of the sentence, you are left with “I friendship.” Thank you for your help.
The expression you give is really two: Rachael's friendship and my friendship. So if we're going to combine them to mean "the friendship that Rachael and I share," we need to say "Rachael's and my friendship." Both terms need a possessive: Rachael's and my.
I hear expressions like "Rachael and I's" fairly often. It may be the beginning of a trend to simplify English so that we don't have subjective and objective cases for pronouns. (I believe something like this has happened in Chinese, where "wo" means both "I" and "me.")
If so, we will probably see the two usages operate as dialects for a long time. Many southern Americans use "y'all" as the second person plural, while the rest of North America uses "you." We understand each other, but it's always a reminder that the other person isn't speaking quite the same English that we are.
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