Contents Introduction The development of personal pronouns in English

Personal pronouns in Old English period
The following paradigm for Anglo-Saxon prounouns is set forth in Bright's Old English² Grammar and Reader.


T he Dream of the Rood, taken from the Vercelli Book written in the second half of the tenth century, serves as the baseline text for this linguistic analysis. The first person pronouns in The Dream of the Rood closely follow the paradigm set forth in Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader


Old English personal pronouns have the forms of three persons, four cases, and three numbers. The features of third person pronouns are:
1) the presence of masculine, feminine and neuter forms in the singular
2) the absence of forms of the dual number
3) the presence of a common form for masculine, feminine and neuter in the plural.
Personal pronouns have a number of features. Pronouns of the 1st l. units and many h. have a suppletive paradigm in which the nominative case comes from a different root than the indirect cases. The same phenomenon is observed in Russian; in Latin, only forms of the pronoun of the 1st literal form are suppletive.
Pronouns³ of the 1st and 2nd l. units hours are reflexes of common Indo-European forms. So, ic corresponds to lat. ego, Greek Ego is also present in all Germanic languages. Pronoun 2nd l. units H. đū has correspondences in Latin—tū, Slavic you, and in all Germanic languages. Pronouns of the 1st and 2nd l. pl. hours have correspondences only within the Germanic languages. Pronouns of the 3rd l. units and many others. h. by origin - demonstrative pronouns. In Latin, ille is a demonstrative pronoun; in a modified sound form, it gave the French il, elle 'he', 'she'). The root of pronouns of the 3rd l. hi- is a regular correspondence to Russian sei.
The category of the genus exists only in units. part 3 l. and is more lexical than grammatical: it is directly dependent on the referent. If a living being, usually a human being, is meant, then the use of the pronoun depends on the gender of the person in question. When talking about a subject, the neuter pronoun is used. The pronoun may conflict with grammatical gender: the noun wīfmann 'woman' (lit., 'female person') is masculine; when substituting, the pronoun heo 'she' is usually used. The noun cild 'child' is replaced by the pronoun hit.
Personal pronouns in the accusative form convey the meaning of recurrence: and hē hine ... Zefliemde "and he took flight", literally, "put him (i.e. "himself") to flight".