Personal Pronouns

 1. THE PERSONAL PRONOUNS

 The word personal has been taken from Latin personalis which means pertaining to a person. It can be described as done in person without the intervention of another or proceeding from a single person.

  Personal pronouns have not only special forms for gender and number and person but also for case; for Latin casus. Casus means that which happens to fall, an accident, and from it comes also those other meanings for case; a case of hives, a mental case, a legal case, and that sadly overworked and useless case in such expressions as "in case he does not come.'

 The Latin grammarians chose the term because they assumed that the other forms of a noun or a pronoun represented so many "feelings away" from the first or the nominative form.

   Unlike the pronoun, an English noun has only two case forms in the singular and plural: the nominative and possessive cases. Thus a regular noun has these forms:

                         Singular. Plural

Nominative. Manager. Managers

Possessive. manager's. manager's

Or, if a noun has an irregular plural like child or woman, then these are the two case forms for singular and plural:

                      Singular. Plural

Nominative. Child woman. Children women

Possessive. child's woman's children’s women's

The apostrophe is thought of as a punctuation mark, but in the possessive forms of English nouns it stands for the lost e in the genitive case of Old English nouns. Thus the genitive case of Old English föt (foot) was fötes, of the foot.

 With these two forms English expresses all the various functions of nouns, whereas Latin requires six forms. But this simplicity of the English noun is not to be found in the personal pronoun. In this one part of speech, which we use all the time, the English-speaking person must learn several case forms, just as a German or a Frenchman must. Study the following table very carefully:

Singular Forms

             N.Case. P.Case. Ob. Case

1st P I My(mine) Me

2nd P. You. Your(Yours). You

3rd P. He. His. Him

                 She. Her(hers). Her

                  It. Its. It

Plural Forms

             N.Case. P.Case. Ob. Case

1st P We Our(ours) Us

2nd P. You. Your(Yours). You

3rd P. They Their (theirs) Them