Unit 6. Oe Pronoun and Adjective

OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes as modem pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups – relative, possessive and reflexive – they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns (in "noun-pronouns") or corresponded to those of adjectives (in "adjective pronouns"). Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.

Personal Pronouns

OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (two numbers in the 3rd) and three genders in the 3rd p. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. had suppletive forms like their parallels in other IE languages. The pronouns of the 3rd p., having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the latter. In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc.; in fact the fusion of these two cases in the pl was completed in the WS dialect already in Early OE: Acc. eowic and usic were replaced by Dat. eow, us; in the sg usage was variable, but variant forms revealed the same tendency to generalise the form of the Dat. for both case's. e.g.:

Se ðe me gehælde, se cwæð tō me – 'He who healed me, he said to me' – the first me, though Dat. in form, serves as an Acc. (direct object); the second me is a real Dat.

Case	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom.	ic	wit	wē
Gen.	mīn	uncer	ūser, ūre
Dat.	mē	unc	ūs
Acc.	mec, mē	unc	ūsic, ūs

Demonstrative Pronouns

There were two demonstrative pronouns in OE: the prototype of NE that, which distinguished three genders in the sg. and had one form for all the genders in the pl. and the prototype of this with the same subdivisions: ðes Masc., ðeos Fem., ðis Neut. and ðas pl. They were declined like adjectives according to a five-case system: Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc., and Instr. (the latter having a special form only in the Mas., Neu.)

Declension of se, seo, ðæt
Case	Singular	Plural
	M N F	All genders
Nom.	se, se ðæt seo	ða
Gen.	ðæs ðæs ðære	ðara, ðæra
Dat.	ðæm ðæm ðære ðam ðam	ðam, ðæm
Acc.	ðone ðæt ða	ða
Instr.	ðy ðy ðære ðon ðon	ðæm, ðam

The paradigm of the demonstrative pronoun se contained many homonymous forms. Some case endings resembled those of personal pronouns, e.g. –m – Dat. Masc. and Neut. and Dat. pl; the element -r- in the Dat. and Gen. sg Fem. and in the Gen. pl. These case endings, which do not occur in the noun paradigms, are often referred to as "pronominal" endings (-m, -r-, -t).