Let’s face it the English language is a mess. But then again it does do its job, people around the world are able to communicate complex and elegant ideas with the use of English. Some of the best poetry makes use of the strange loop holes in the language, then again so do a lot of sitcoms. Why has our language turned out the way it did? This is complex due to the large number of factors that are involved. Fashion, style, social change, religion, politics, wealth, the desire for the young to have a different vocabulary from the old, all of these and many more are factors that influence the evolution of a language. The language itself is not alive, but it is used to express the thoughts, desires, ideas and dreams of living beings and so can be easily anthropomorphised. The end result (currently) of all these different factors pulling and pushing on the language is that English lacks a cohesive structure, instead having many different and contradictory rules. This does not make it a better or worse language than any other, just difficult to use well. A good example of the complications are the personal pronouns. What am I talking about? Basically a pronoun is a word that ‘stands in’ for the noun. And personal pronouns stand in for personal nouns, peoples names. So instead of: Fred went to the shop, where Fred bought a pack of fags. We can short cut with: Fred went to the shop, where he bought a pack of fags. The he is a personal pronoun, used to reduce needed to constantly say Fred. There are more of these little words than you might think at first, here is a list of them:
Subject | Object | Possessive Adjective | Possessive Pronoun | Reflexive | Number | Gender |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
FIRST PERSON | ||||||
I | me | my | mine | myself | singular | neutral |
we | us | our | ours | ourselves | plural | neutral |
SECOND PERSON | ||||||
you | you | your | yours | yourself | singular | neutral |
you | you | your | yours | yourself | plural | neutral |
THIRD PERSON | ||||||
he | him | his | his | himself | singular | masculine |
she | her | her | hers | herself | singular | feminine |
it | it | its | its | itself | singular | neuter |
they | them | their | theirs | themselves | plural | neutral |
Take your time to have a bit of a look at this table, notice the lack of any over arching rules that could sum up all of these different word forms. Well be referring back to this table in rest of this little series. Also see: Part One - First person pronouns Part Two - Second person pronouns Part Three - Third person pronouns Part Four - Miscellaneous, Conclusion and References