Pronouns

Foreward
These are pronouns one could use in Anglish. Many of these pronouns died off at sundry times in English's history, but here they are put forth as if they never died.

Know that this list is not exhaustive and could be more complete, especially if more Old English forms were included.

The Writ
1 Ich is what the pronoun (OE ic) would have regularly become, but in many dialects, the pronoun had been reduced to a single i, having lost its consonant sound. The reduced form was then later lengthened, whence the standard pronoun I. Ich was present in some dialects in Shakespeare's time, however; in King Lear, a character trying to sound rustic says chill, a contraction of ich will. It seems that ich is now obsolete, as the last recorded instance of its use was made in the middle of the 20th century.

2 Originally, in Old English, metch (OE mec), thetch (OE þec), and hin (OE hine) were accusatives, and me, thee, and him were datives. In short, metch and me corresponded to German mich and mir, respectively. Over time, however, for the first and second persons, the dative pronouns began to be used as accusatives, and so in the West Saxon dialect, mec and þec were seldom found, but were commoner in other dialects. In the end, mec and þec had died out by the start of the Middle English period; hine lasted a bit longer, but it soon died out.

3 Mine and thine were the original possessive forms, but in Middle English, they lost their last n, and so my and thy came to be. A distinction was then made between the two sets: my and thy were used as possessive adjectives, and mine and thine as possessive pronouns. In Early Modern English, mine and thine were also used as adjectives, however, when foregoing words beginning with vowel sounds, e.g., mine eyes, thine ax; in short, it was the same distinction between a and an.

4 Strictly speaking, the compound reflexive forms are utterly needless for the first and second persons, since it is clear in those cases that the subject and the object are the same. For example, I saw me is as clear as I saw myself. It is only in the third person that the reflexives are truly needed, since the object may refer to either what the subject refers to or another, e.g., he saw him may not necessarily be the same as he saw himself. Therefore, the simple objective forms are listed in the column of reflexive pronouns for the first and second persons.

5 Like the other Germanic tongues in their early stages, Old English had a set of dual pronouns for the first and second persons. There were no special grammatical forms for the dual in verbs, however; the plural forms were used instead. In theory, since there was a dual, the plural pronouns would have been used only in reference to three or more. However, the dual was not always used, and whenever it was used, it was to show that only two people were referred to. The dual pronouns later died out sometime in the early 14th century.

6 Hoo is a dialectal variant of the feminine pronoun, which was hēo in Old English and developed into he in some Middle English dialects. The standard pronoun, she, appears to be a variant that became widespread in Middle English likely because the masculine and the feminine came to have the same nominative form in some dialects. Thus, a need was felt that the nominative for the masculine and that for the feminine be differentiated formally.

7 The old possessive for the neuter was his, and so the masculine and the neuter had the same possessive forms, as it still does in Dutch and German. An example of this is if the salt have lost his savour from a line in the King James Bible. Its was formed in the Early Modern English period as a unique possessive form, and it was quickly accepted into the speech.

8 The reflexive possessive (OE sīn) is the only attested English remnant of the original Germanic reflexive pronoun; the accusative, akin to German sich, must have died out very early, as no trace of it is found in any known Old English writs. The reflexive possessive was seldom used even in Old English, and so it never made it to the Middle English tide. If it had survived, it would have split off into sy and sine, following the same pattern as mine and thine.

9In the Middle English period, the native third-person plural pronouns came to sound like those for the masculine and feminine singular in many instances. A borrowing from Old Norse, they was first adopted in areas showing great Scandinavian influence, and it gradually spread to other dialects. Chaucer used they as the nominative, but he kept the native forms for the objective and the possessive. By the Early Modern English period, the Norse set had displaced the native set wholly. The only remnant of the native set is 'em, an unstressed form of hem, but this is often thought by speakers to be a contraction of them instead.

In Middle English, there was a set of possessive pronouns formed by analogy of mine and thine. These forms are as etymologically good as the -s forms, but nonetheless, the latter set became the standard in the end, and the -n set is now found only in some regional dialects.

Note that the neuter possessive is still its; not only did its begin to appear in the Early Modern English period, but the absolute use of the neuter possessive is also uncommon, so no such form as itsn has ever appeared and blossomed.

Verb conjugation has much changed since the Old English period. For instance, the plural ending -en is now obsolete. The conjugation for be is particularly special, as there are many obsolete forms:

For the present tense, one can see that there are two sets of forms, as the conjugation for be is historically made up of those of two different Old English verbs: wesan and bēon:


 * 1) Am, art, is, and are come from the wesan conjugation. Are (Old English earon) was not used in the West Saxon dialect (which used sind and its variants instead), but was present in the Anglian dialects. Are began to be used more in Middle English and eventually overthrew be in the standard speech.
 * 2) Sind, also from wesan, died out very early on in the Middle English period.
 * 3) Sie (si in Middle English) was the singular present subjunctive from wesan and died out very early in the Middle English period. The plural subjunctive was sīen in Old English, and if it had been kept, it would have become sie, the same as the singular (as the plural suffix would have been dropped like in are and be).
 * 4) Be, bist, and bith come from bēon, from which the infinitive be, the present participle being, and the past participle been also come. All present indicative forms are now archaic or dialectal, and in the standard speech, the plural present indicative be is found only in the phrase the powers that be.
 * 5) Both wesan and bēon shared the same past tense forms, and from those verbs come was and were.
 * 6) Wast and wert for the second-person singular are innovative forms that first appeared in the latter half of the Middle English period. The original form was were (both indicative and subjunctive). The common but not universal distinction made between the two forms (as seen in the King James Bible) is that wast is indicative, and wert subjunctive.

Note that the indicative forms have replaced the subjunctive forms over time, and so most constructions that historically take the subjunctive are commonly found with the indicative forms instead (see here for more information about the subjunctive).