From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to modern German or Icelandic. Old English distinguished between the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental cases. Declension fell into disuse during the Middle English period, when accusative and dative pronouns merged into a single objective pronoun. Nouns in Modern English no longer decline for case, except for remnants of the former system in a few pronouns.
"Who" and "whom", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", etc. are remnants of both the old nominative versus accusative and also of nominative versus dative. In other words, "her" (for example) serves as both the dative and accusative version of the nominative pronoun "she". In Old English as well as modern German and Icelandic as further examples, these cases had distinct pronouns.
This collapse of the separate case pronouns into the same word is one of the reasons grammarians consider the dative and accusative cases to be extinct in English — neither is an ideal term for the role played by "whom". Instead, the term objective is often used; that is, "whom" is a generic objective pronoun which can describe either a direct or an indirect object. The nominative case, "who", is called simply the subjective. The information formerly conveyed by having distinct case forms is now mostly provided by prepositions and word order.
Modern English morphologically distinguishes only one case, the possessive case — which some linguists argue is not a case at all, but a clitic (see the entry for genitive case for more information). With only a few pronominal exceptions, the objective and subjective always have the same form.
[edit] Evolution of English declension
[edit] Interrogative pronouns
[edit] Old masculine/feminine to the modern person
1 - Most generally speaking, in non-subject rules: "whom" is used in "formal" situations and in writing, while "who" is colloquial or "informal". A dialectal investigation should be taken into consideration, of course.
[edit] Old neuter to the modern thing
1 - Usually replaced by of which, except where inappropriate
[edit] First person personal pronouns
[edit] Singular
[edit] Plural
[edit] Second person personal pronouns
n.b. þ is a letter from Old English, roughly corresponding to th.
[edit] Old and Middle English singular to the Modern English archaic informal
[edit] Old and Middle English plural to the archaic formal to the modern general
You in the nominative case was used in Middle English only as a formal but not as a plural pronoun. So there was a difference between You are (singular formal) and Ye are (plural informal).[citation needed]
Note that the ye/you distinction still existed, at least optionally, in Early Modern English: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" from the King James Bible.
[edit] Formal and informal forms of the second person singular and plural
[edit] Third person personal pronouns
[edit] Feminine singular
[edit] Masculine singular
[edit] Neuter singular
[edit] Plural
[edit] External link
