Personal Pronouns : Part Zero — The problem with the English language is you!

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:

Declen­sion of Cur­rent Per­son­al Pro­nouns

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