Personal Pronouns

§ 174. As shown in Table 5 below, 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 (see § 62). The pronouns of the 3rd p., having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the latter (cf. the forms in Table 6).

§ 175. 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. ēowic and ūsic were replaced by Dat. ēow, ūs; in the sg usage was variable, but variant forms revealed the same tendency to generalise the form of the Dat. for both cases. This is seen in the following quotation: Sē pe mē ʒehǣlde, sē cwæð tō mē ‘He who healed me, he said to me’ — the first mē, though Dat. in form, serves as an Acc. (direct object); the second mē is a real Dat.

§ 176. It is important to note that the Gen. case of personal pronouns had two main applications: like other oblique cases of noun-pronouns it could be an object, but far more frequently it was used as an attribute or a noun determiner, like a possessive pronoun, e. g. sunu min, his fæder (NE my son, his father). Though forms of the Gen. case were employed as possessive pronouns, they cannot be regarded as possessive pronouns proper (that is, as a separate class of pronouns). The grammatical characteristics of these forms were not homogeneous. The forms of the 1st and 2nd p. — min, ūre and others — were declined like adjectives to show agreement with the nouns they modified, while the forms of the 3rd p. behaved like nouns: they remained uninflected and did not agree with the nouns they modified.

Cf.:

Nim pin ʒesceot... and pinne boʒan ‘take thy (thine) implements for shooting and thy bow’ (pin and pinne show agreement with the nouns —Acc. sg, Neut. and Masc.)

He ... sēalde hit hys mēder ‘he gave it to his mother’.

hēo befēold his handa ‘she covered his hands’ (his does not change its form though mider is Dat. sg, handa — Acc. pl).

Table 5

Declension of Personal Pronouns

First person
Case	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom.	ic	wit	wē
Gen.	min	uncer	ūre, ūser
Dat.	me	unc	ūs
Acc.	mec, mē	uncit	ūsic, ūs
Second person
Nom.	pū	ʒit	ʒē
Gen.	pin	incer	ēower
Dat.	pē	inc	ēow
Acc.	pēc, pē	incit, inc	ēowic, ēow
Third person
Singular	Plural
	M	F	N	All genders
Nom.	hē	hēo, hio	hit	hie, hi, hӯ, hēo
Gen.	his	hire, hiere	his	hira, heora, hiera, hyra
Dat.	him	hire, hiere	him	him, heom
Acc.	hine	hie, hi, hӯ	hit	hie, hi, hӯ, hēo

§ 177. The oblique cases of personal pronouns in combination with the adjective self could also serve as reflexive pronouns, e. g.:

ʒif hwā hwæt lӯtles ǣniʒes biwistes him selfum if ʒearcode... ‘If any one provided himself with some small portion of food...’

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