Not necessarily. It is determined by the subject. He, she, or they calls for "who" and him, her, or them calls for "whom." Whom is correct for bookworm's question.
A neighbour once told me that I talk like a book. When I asked what he meant, he replied that I use correct grammar -- that he could even hear the punctuation in my cadences, tonal modulation and phrasing.
I was raised to speak this way. Even the inside of my brain sounds this way.
My trouble comes when people speak in broad accents with lots of colloquialisms. Then I'm lost, as if they were speaking a foreign language. American TV drives me nuts because there are so many idioms I don't understand and new ones constantly arising.
This post was edited by inky at May 1, 2020 2:12 PM MDT
The same thing happens to us/with us in the US when we watch or listen to programming from British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, South African, etc. sources. We’re largely lost on the local colloquialisms and local accents, etc., and it all seems as if they speak too fast for us to understand completely what’s being said. (Exclude Canada: we just throw in an “eh” at the end of every sentence, spray moose sweat all over the place, and they understand us perfectly.)
It’s the same thing with the Spanish language. I speak, read, write and understand Spanish, but due to the fact that I live just miles north of the US border with Mexico, my Spanish-listening ear is tuned to Mexican Spanish. There are native Spanish speakers from other countries who seem to be speaking an entirely different tongue, and/or certain words and phrases differ by country or region. That’s notwithstanding different dialects, which of course also play into the diaspora. What’s even worse for the Spanish speaker who’s listening to me, what with my American accent and the fact that I was in my thirties when I learned Spanish, I’m nowhere near the fluency of a native speaker from any Spanish-speaking country. ~
What you’ve asked here about the s sound and the th sound in Spanish is correct, but there are also dozens of other differences, far too numerous for me too delineate. (And truthfully, far too numerous for me to even recognize them all, not being a native speaker of the language.)
There is a litany of differences between English spoken in one country or another wherein both share it as the primary and/or official language, but when you think about it, the same can be true within a country’s borders. There are probably some words used in your part of Australia that differ in another part of Australia. It’s the same with Spanish, but there are so many countries which have Spanish as the primary/official language, far more people speak variations of it than those who speak variations of English.
Language worldwide mirrors that phenomenon also. Look at a country, a culture, a population that has a unique language not spoken natively anywhere else in the world, as opposed to English or French or Cantonese or Portuguese or Spanish or Dutch (German), etc. The Korean language is one example. In its original form over 100 years ago, it was not spoken natively anywhere else in the world except Korea. There were dialectal differences in the core language throughout its land even then. However, fast-forward to the political scene that evolved there through 1955 to 1970 to 1995 to 2015, and now split into two countries,?North Korea and South Korea, there are quite noticeable differences in language that a person’s origin is almost immediately known after having spoken or having listened to just a few words. Soldiers, spies, infiltrators stand the chance of being easily recognized that way all the time.
In my wife’s native country, there are over 50 distinct languages and/or dialects spoken, and in some places, it’s possible that two people from neighboring provinces won’t even be able to communicate verbally because not one word or phrase or concept is the same between them. There is an official/national language, but even it is not spoken universally throughout the entire country.
My speech has more slang and accented words than my writing. ie. I would say: I am "fixin' " to do go cook dinner. I would write: I am going to cook dinner.
Randy D 