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First person includes the speaker (English: I, we), second person is the person or people spoken to (English: your or you), and third person includes all that are not listed above (English: he, she, it, they). [1] It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.
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 Oxford English Dictionary dates written examples of calling ships she to at least 1308 (in the Middle English period), in materials translated from French, which has grammatical gender. [19] One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century.
The vote followed the previous year's approval of this use by The Washington Post style guide, when Bill Walsh, the Post ' s copy editor, said that the singular they is "the only sensible solution to English's lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun". [111] In 2019, the non-binary they was added to Merriam-Webster's ...
second-person pronouns normally refer to the person or persons being addressed (as the English you); in the plural they may also refer to the person or persons being addressed together with third parties. third-person pronouns normally refer to third parties other than the speaker or the person being addressed (as the English he, she, it, they).
Third person, or third-person, may refer to: Third person (grammar), a point of view (in English, he, she, it, and they) Illeism, the act of referring to oneself in the third person; Third-person narrative, a perspective in plays, storytelling, or movies
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 ...
An obviative/proximate system has a different way of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents. When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative".