CHAPTER VI.

GRAMMATICAL CHANGES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON IN BECOMING ENGLISH.-THE PRONOUN.

XX. The Personal Pronouns.-1. Their Persistence.-All of these, and these in all their cases, except its, are in the Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, many of them are Indo-European as well-the pronouns, more than any other part of speech, surviving in the several languages of the family. Their Anglo-Saxon inflections also are retained in English. It is to the pronouns that we look for the only distinctive objectives in English-me, thee, him, her, us, them, and whom ; all of which, except whom, are personal pronouns.

2. Forms Transferred.—The English case corresponding to the Anglo-Saxon accusative is the objective. But with the exception of it-our objective as well as nominative-the English objectives of the personal pronouns are the AngloSaxon datives. This wholesale transfer of case-forms is remarkable. It began even in Anglo-Saxon, and by 1350 was completed.

3. Conversion of Anglo-Saxon Demonstratives into English Personals.—Our she is the Anglo-Saxon demonstrative sēo; and our third person plurals, they, their, them, are the plurals of this same demonstrative.

4. Change in the Spelling of Some Personal Pronouns. By 1350, ic was written i; and afterwards I to distinguish it, Lounsbury thinks, from the prefix i of the passive participle.

The Anglo-Saxon genitives min and pin had each two forms in English, as they sometimes dropped the n and sometimes retained it. The double forms were subsequently utilized; mi and thi stood before consonants, and min and thin before vowels and silent h. Later still, mi and thi, now written my and thy, were placed before vowels also, and min and thin, spelled mine and thine, were used in the predicate; as in, This book is mine.

5. Its. His is the Anglo-Saxon genitive of the masculine and the neuter of the third personal pronoun, hè and hit, and so took the place of nouns denoting persons and of those denoting inanimate things. This in time came to be regarded.as improper; and the impropriety seemed the more glaring when, by the dropping of h from hit, the relation of it to he, that of the neuter to the masculine of the same pronoun, was forgotten. The literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries betrays a growing sense of the impropriety, and abounds with substitutes for his as the genitive of it. Of it, thereof, her, it, the, and it own were all used.

It had three ribs in the mouth of it, between the teeth of it.-Dan. vii. 5. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly, thou settlest the furrows thereof, thou blessest the springing thereof.-Ps. lxv. 10. And made thy body bare of her two branches.-Titus Andron. II. 4, 18. That it had it head bit off by it young.-King Lear, I. 4, 204. That will be thawed from the true quality with that which melteth fools. -Jul. Cæsar, III. 1, 41.

In the folio of 1623, appearing seven years after Shakespeare's death, the editors have it fourteen times where now we should use its. Six of the fourteen have own following the it; as in, To it own protection and favor of the climate. Winter's Tale.

The first appearance, yet noted, of the new coinage its (a

grammatical blunder, since the t of hit, or it, is a case ending, and so its contains the possessive ending s plus the nominative neuter ending t) is in 1598. Spenser, 1553-1599, and Bacon, 1561-1626, never use its. Its is not found in the Bible of 1611, except in Lev. xxv. 5, and not even there in the early editions. Shakespeare in the 1623 folio uses it's* nine times and its only once- -Made former wonders its. Hen. VIII. I. 1, 18. Seven of these nine appearances are in two of his latest plays-The Tempest and Winter's Tale. Milton uses its only three times in his poetry, though more frequently in his prose; and Trench, says that Macaulay, 1800-1859, declared that he avoided its when he could.

No one now thinks of shunning its. We quote a sentence from the late Professor Phelps to show how frequently its may appear in good society without giving offence.

"I have endeavored to follow it [a prayer] from its inception in a human mind, through its utterance by human lips, and in its flight up to the ear of Him who is its hearer because he has been also its inspirer, and on its journey around the unnumbered points . . . which this feeble voice reaches, and on its return from those altitudes with its golden train of blessings."

6. Ye and You.-The Anglo-Saxon ge and low came into English as ye and you. These were used as they were in Anglo-Saxon, the one as the nominative, and the other as the objective, plural of the second personal pronoun. They are always so used in Chaucer, and in the English Bible of 1611; though this version reflects in this, as in so many other particulars, a usage older than that of its day. Con

* In the paper conveying to his nephew the desk on which the Declaration of Independence was written, Thomas Jefferson, in 1825, uses it's twice. This paper is in the State Department at Washington.

fusion between the nominative and the objective of the pronouns sprang up in the sixteenth century. This was the case with ye and you. They said, also, It is me; between you and I. Shakespeare, while employing both ye and you, does not observe this old distinction between them. Nor do we of the present day, although attempts have been made, notably by the rhetorician Campbell, a century ago, to revive it. We have simply adopted the form you (originally objective) for both nominative and objective.

7. Thou and You.-In addressing a single person the Anglo-Saxons always used the pronoun in the singular. But thou has yielded to you, except among the Friends, in poetry, and in prayer. In this substitution of the plural for the singular," as though the person addressed were as good as two or more ordinary people," which was begun in the thirteenth century and completed in the sixteenth, we have followed especially the lead of the Dutch and the French. On its way to extinction in the speech of polite life and of literature, thou came to be used "as the pronoun of (1) affection towards friends, (2) good-humored superiority to servants, and (3) contempt or anger to strangers." All these uses are illustrated in Shakespeare and in the literature of his day.

8. Ours, Yours, Hers, and Theirs.-The s of the genitive, seen in his and then in its, was extended, by a false analogy, to our, your, her, and their, when unconnected. with nouns, and so made double genitives of them-This book is ours or yours or hers or theirs. Ourn, yourn, hern, his'n, theirn, vulgar and ungrammatical as they are, are dialectical, forming their double genitive in n rather than s, after the fashion of the n declension.

In Anglo-Saxon there were the possessive adjective

pronouns (1) min and thin, exactly like the genitive of the first and second personal pronouns, and (2) ure and eower (our and your), exact duplicates of the genitive plural of these same pronouns. So that when, in passing into English, the genitive of the personal pronouns also was restricted to the possessive relation, and the endings of the possessive adjectives were dropped, it became difficult to tell whether the forms used belonged to the one class of pronouns or to the other.

9. Self. In the Anglo-Saxon the ordinary personal pronouns are used as reflexive pronouns as well. They are so used in English, especially in poetry.

And millions in those solitudes, since first the flight of years began, have laid them down in their last sleep.-Bryant.

But these pronouns were frequently strengthened by the addition of silf, sylf, seolf, or self-meaning the same, the aforesaid-used as an adjective, and agreeing in number and case with the pronoun it strengthened. Used to strengthen the pronoun when it was the subject of the sentence, the pronoun had to be repeated in the dative before self; as, He (him) self did it. This was its customary employment. Since about 1350, self has followed the objective of the third personal pronoun, and is attached to it for self at first always stood alone, and we say himself, herself, itself, and themselves; but in the first and second persons, self is appended to the possessive case of the pronouns, and we say myself, thyself, ourself, yourself, ourselves, and yourselves.

It would seem that self early had, and all along down has retained, something of a substantive force. An adjective can stand between it and the possessive of the pronoun; it can be modified by a noun, and by the pronoun one, in the pos