Possessive me

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Possessive me is the apparent use of "me" in places where^{[dubious – discuss]} English has "my". For example:

"That's me house" (That's my house): [ðæts mi haʊs]

This is probably not a result of confusion between the possessive pronoun "my" and the object pronoun "me", as is often believed. In Middle English my before a consonant was pronounced [mi:], like modern English me, (while me was [me:], similar to modern may) and this was shortened to [mi] or [mɪ], as the pronouns he and we are nowadays; [hi wɒz] he was; versus [ɪt wɒz hi:] it was he. As this vowel was short, it was not subject to the Great Vowel Shift, and so emerged in modern English unchanged.

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