Articles

Though the articles are closely connected with nouns, they are separate words with particular lexical meanings and grammatical properties.

It was during the Middle English period that the articles were isolated from other classes of words and became, so to say, a class of words by themselves.

T he definite article is an outgrowth of the OE demonstrative pronoun sē. The suppletivity observed in Old English was lost. The sound [s] of the OE nominative case, singluar, masculine (sē) and feminine (sēo) was replaced by the sound [θ] on the analogy of the oblique cases (þæs, þæm, þone, etc.). With the development of ēo > ē, the forms þē and þēo fell together as þē, later spelt the.

The neuter form þæt, ME ‘that’, retained its full demonstrative force, while ‘the’ was weakened both in meaning and form. Gradually they became two different words.

‘The’ lost all gender, case and number distinctions, and became entirely uninflected.

The indefinite article has developed from the OE numeral ān (E. one), whose meaning sometimes weakened to “one of many”, “some” even in OE. The weakening of the meaning was accompanied by the weakening of the stress. The long [ā] was shortened in the unstressed ān, so that ān > an. Later the unstressed [a] was reduced in pronunciation to [ə]. The consonant [n] was usually lost before consonants but retained before vowels.

Pronouns

The pronouns have retained their forms better than other parts of speech. Still, great changes took place even here during the Middle English period.

The personal pronouns lost their dual forms.

Their dative and accusative cases had mostly fallen together already in Old English. In Middle English the fusion of the two cases into one (the objective case) was completed.

The OE Genitive case forms of the personal pronouns gradually narrowed the range of their syntactic usage. They also narrowed their meanings to that of “possession” and came to form a separate group of possessive pronouns in Middle English.

Thus, the ME personal pronouns distinguished only two cases: the nominative and the objective.

Speaking of individual instances, it is necessary to remember that forms of the third person plural (OE. hīe, him) were gradually replaced, first in the North, by the Scandinavian forms thei (they), theim (them). Besides, the Scandinavian their superseded the corresponding ME possessive pronoun hire (< OE. hira).

Not quite clear is the history of the form she. The OE forms hē ‘he’ and hēo ‘she’ became homonyms in ME, which was very inconvenient. From about 1300 on the forms scho, sche appeared in the Northern and East Midland dialects. Some scholars regard those forms as having developed from hēo, others speak of the influence of sēo (demonstrative, feminine), still others consider Scandinavian sja as the source of she.

Hers, ours, yours, theirs appeared in the north during the thirteenth century, and in the south by the later fourteenth. The -s is presumably analogically extended from the noun genitive. The n-less forms my, thy first appeared variably when the following word began with a consonant (cf. ModE a/an); but up through the sixteenth century both could appear in all environments [Hogg. A History of the English language, 2006]. The possessive of it (present-day its) was his, right up to the time of Shakespeare.