To whom it may concern

There's still no escape from the ubiquitous hit Somebody That I Used To Know by the Belgian-Australian musician Gotye. As a joke, someone at www.grammarly.com posted a picture with the song title changed to Somebody Whom I Used To Know.

Googling whom then led me to an interesting entry on Wikipedia. Having recently covered English relative pronouns with my students here in Switzerland, seeing who and whom mentioned in comparison with their German equivalents pleased me somewhat. This is because German's rigid case system makes it clear which pronoun is correct in each instance. More of that later.

We are told that the pronoun who is used when the person it replaces is the subject of the sentence, most commonly as an interrogative pronoun (i.e. in a question):

 Who is the President of the USA?

The pronoun who currently stands in place of Barack Obama and is the subject of the above sentence. We are also told that whom is used when the person it replaces is the object of the sentence (in this case, more specifically, the object of the preposition to), thus:

Who is the President of the USA talking to?
To whom is the President of the USA talking?

The President is still the subject carrying out the action, but whom is the recipient of that action – the object. (The two variants should calm those who hyperventilate at the sight of a clause ending with a preposition.) But few people use whom anymore, anyway. Besides, why use whom or who when even for Cambridge University it's fine to say '... the woman that he married' (Hashemi and Thomas, 2011:201)? And as for the distinction between direct objects and indirect objects – we can get by without all of that, surely?

Well, not if you want to learn German, you can't! This is because the German case system means that all syntactic elements – including pronouns – are marked by case endings to indicate gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular or plural) and their respective functions:

Who are you giving the book to?
To whom are you giving the book?

German translation: Wem gibst du das Buch?

The subject in both English sentences above is you (du in the German). But there are two objects – the book (das Buch), the direct object; and its recipient (Wem in the German), the indirect object. The role of the recipient in German can only be played by Wem. There is no who/whom/that uncertainty. Here's a hypothetical scenario: imagine that the computer at an adoption agency has crashed and details of prospective parents, children and their caseworkers have been lost:

Who is giving who to whom?
Who is giving who to who?

Again, avoiding a full explanation of the German case system (and what we might refer to here as the subject case, direct object case and indirect object case) – the case markers in German give us this translation:

Wer gibt wen wem?

So to conclude, where English seemingly requires a new rule or exception for every conceivable sentence; for all its apparent complexity, German grammar is much simpler in comparison. I still believe that Gotye's protagonist is a direct object rather than an indirect one. The jokey whom is a hypercorrection of who or that – though the song title could even contain no relative pronoun at all!

I trust that I have not bored you too much, dear reader. If we have met in real life, I hope I do not now count as one of your erstwhile acquaintances.