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A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical person. 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]
For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and clusivity, such as mitripela ("they two and I") and yumitripela ("you two and I"). [4] Some languages do not have third-person personal pronouns, instead using demonstratives (e.g. Macedonian) [5] or full noun phrases.
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. A male person, and sometimes a male animal, is referred to using he.
The inclusive form is derived from the second-person pronoun and the first-person pronoun. The exclusive form is derived from the first-person singular and the third-person plural. There are significant dialectal and diachronic variations in the exclusive form. English creole: Lakota: uŋ(k)- uŋ(k)- ... -pi Neither The inclusive form has a ...
The first two in the sequence are by far the most common; 'tertiary' appears occasionally, and higher numbers are rare except in specialized contexts ('quaternary period'). The Greek series proto- , deutero- , trito- , ... is only found in prefixes, generally scholarly and technical coinages, e.g. protagonist, deuteragonist, tritagonist ...
Sep. 29—Gale Sayers, the late, great halfback of the Chicago Bears, wrote a book called I am Third. The title referred to what he said was his approach to life: "The Lord is first, my friends ...
You is used to refer to an indeterminate person, as a more common alternative to the very formal indefinite pronoun one. [30] Though this may be semantically third person, for agreement purposes, you is always second person. Example: "One should drink water frequently" or "You should drink water frequently".