The substitution of /who/ for /whom/ in the objective case, just noticed, is typical of a general movement toward breaking down all case distinctions among the pronouns, where they make their last stand in English and its dialects. This movement, of course, is not peculiar to vulgar American; nor is it of recent beginning. So long ago as the fifteenth century the old clear distinction between /ye/, nominative, and /you/, objective, disappeared, and today the latter is used in both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between /ye/ and /thee/, the objective form of the true second singular, was responsible for this confusion.[62] At the start /ye/ actually went over to the objective case, and the usage thus established shows itself in such survivors of the period as /harkee/ (/hark ye/) and /look ye/. In modern spoken English, indeed, /you/ in the objective often has a sound far more like that of /ye/ than like that of /you/, as, for example, in "how do y' do?" and in American its vowel takes the neutral form of the /e/ in the definite article, and the word becomes a sort of shortened /yuh/. But whenever emphasis is laid upon it, /you/ becomes quite distinct, even in American. In "I mean /you/," for example, there is never any chance of mistaking it for /ye/. In Shakespeare's time the other personal pronouns of the objective case threatened to follow /you/ into the nominative, and there was a compensatory movement of the nominative pronouns toward the objective. Lounsbury has collected many examples.[63] Marlowe used "is it /him/ you seek?" "'tis /her/ I esteem" and "nor /thee/ nor /them/, shall want"; Fletcher used "'tis /her/ I admire"; Shakespeare himself used "that's /me/." Contrariwise, Webster used "what difference is between the duke and /I/?" and Greene used "nor earth nor heaven shall part my love and /I/." Krapp has unearthed many similar examples from the Restoration dramatists.[64] Etheredge used "'tis /them/," "it may be /him/," "let you and /I/" and "nor is it /me/"; Matthew Prior, in a famous couplet, achieved this: [Pg220] For thou art a girl as much brighter than /her/. As he was a poet sublimer than /me/.