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The singular and plural use of they can be compared with the pronoun you, which had been both a plural and polite singular, but by the 18th century replaced thou for singular referents. [140] For "you", the singular reflexive pronoun (" yourself ") is different from its plural reflexive pronoun (" yourselves "); with "they" one can hear either ...
The indefinite/impersonal third person is gender-neutral, as is the plural third person: plural third person de 'they' man 'someone' As for first-person and second-person pronouns, they are gender-neutral in both the singular and plural first person: singular jag; plural vi; second-person: singular du; plural ni
Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows a similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where ...
they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular) Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French , the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
The third-person singular forms are differentiated according to the gender of the referent. For example, she is used to refer to a female person, sometimes a female animal, and sometimes an object to which female characteristics are attributed, such as a ship or a country.
Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē, which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun.
The third-person singular personal pronouns are chosen according to the natural gender of their antecedent or referent. As a general rule: As a general rule: he (and its related forms him , himself , his ) is used when the referent is male, or something to which male characteristics are attributed;