Lecture 18

Number

Gender

Personal Pronouns

Indefinite Article

The indefinite article appeared from the OE numeral ān (one) and had the meaning of “oneness” (it still indicates only nouns in Sg, i.e. nouns indicating one object or notion).

In OE ān had 5-case paradigm that was lost in ME and only one form was left – oon/one. Later it was employed in the building of the indefinite article a/an.

See Lecture 14 for the categories of the personal pronouns.

Personal Pronouns possessed (and still do) a very vivid Indo-European feature – suppletivity (i.e. they build their forms with the help of different roots (see also Lecture 4)).

Personal pronouns in OE changed in Gender, Number, Case, Person:

Pers.	Case	Number
Singular	Plural	Dual
1st	Nom	ic	wē	wit
Gen	min	ūre	uncer
Dat	mē	ūs	unc
Acc	mec/mē	ūsic	uncit
2nd	Nom	þu*	ζē*	ζit
Gen	þin	ēower	incer
Dat	þe	ēow*	inc
Acc	þec/þe	ēowic	incit

Pers.	Case	Gender, Number
M, Sg	F, Sg	N, Sg	Plural
3rd	Nom	hē*	hēo/hīo*	hit*	hēo/hīe*
Gen	his	hire	his	hira
Dat	him	hire	him	him
Acc	hine	hīe	hit	hēo/hīe

Later the following changes happened to the personal pronouns (some of them are marked with * in the table above so that one can trace the connection easily):

Genderisstill preserved(he, she, it) in ModE but is often denied by scholars because it is expressed lexically and practically has nothing to do with grammar.

2. Cases:

· In ME the Genitive Case turned into a new class of pronouns – Possessive Pronouns (e.g. ModE I (pers.) – mine (possess.); you – yours, he – his, she – her, etc.);

· The Dative and the Accusative Cases fell together and formed the Objective Case. Thus in ME there were only two cases left in the personal pronouns – Nominative and Objective (e.g. ModE I (Nom) – me (Obj); he – him, she – her, etc.).

Dual formsdisappeared in ME. In NE the category of Number disappeared in the 2^nd person of the personal pronouns (see the explanation below).

4. 3^rd person

As far as in the Early ME many forms in the 3^rd person coincided phonetically and often caused confusion and difficulties in communication, the following changes occurred:

Pers.	Gender	OE	Early ME	Late ME	Comments
3rd	M, Sg	hē à	he à	he	preserved original form
F, Sg	hēo/hīo à	he à	she	As far as it coincided with M, Sg and Plural forms, a new word was found – derived from the demonstrative pronoun sēo (F, Sg, Nom) – to distinguish the forms.
N, Sg	hit à	hit à	it	preserved original form, lost initial [h]
Plural	hēo/hīe à	he/hi à	they	As far as it coincided with M, Sg and F, Sg forms, a new word was found – a Scandinavian borrowing – to distinguish the forms.

5. 2^nd person

Pers.	Number	OE	ME	Comments	NE
2nd	Sg	þu à	thou à	Fell out of use due to the French etiquette (it forbade impolite “thou” form, so it was replaced with the polite “ēow” form).	ēow (Pl, Dat)(you)
Pl	ζē à	ye à	Coincided phonetically with wē à was dropped

Thus in NE the category of Number disappeared in the 2^nd person of the personal pronouns.

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