Which of the following is correct?
It is I. It is me.
A grammar teacher mentioned to me something about the nominative case being used after the verb “to be” and not the usual objective case (”me”) that I thought it should be. He said the verb “to be” was an exception, but I can’t find anywhere that this is written down as such. Anyone any thoughts?
What does correct mean? Long ago when I was young, the rule was that the verb to be takes no object - there is a grammatical logic to it. However, people commonly say "it is me" and that form is now 'correct' by usage.
When living in Denmark and learning Danish at school, my teacher corrected me for saying "det er jeg" - in Danish, "it is I" is consider *wrong*, and I should have said "det er mig"!
Right and wrong are just notions...
Your grammar teacher is right. Yeah I know, it sounds funny to knock on you're friend's door and when they ask "who is it?" you answer "it's I." But "to be" is not a transitive verb. In fact, the funny properties of "to be" are highlighted by the fact that many languages (Hebrew, Russian, Arabic...) don't even have such a verb in the present tense. In those languages, you would literally say "it I" (it would not make sense to say in Russian "eto menya," see www.painintherussian.com). Not only is "to be" a funny verb, but English makes very funny use of its case system. Back in the day (c. 600 AD) when English's case system was more important in English grammar than it is today, transitive verbs sometimes took the genetive (i.e., "drincan wines," to drink of wine), and the application of the accusative, dative, and instrumental cases was virtually arbitrary. Given that kind of historical background for English cases, it isn't surprising that a given verb will take a case that does not necessarily make sense (in this instance, nominative for "to be").
How about:
It is I who knocked on the door
but
It is me you are looking for.
?
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