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The word one developed from Old English an, itself from Proto-Germanic *ainaz, from Proto-Indo-European root *oi-no-, [4] but it was not originally a pronoun. The pronoun one may have come into use as an imitation of French on beginning in the 15th century. [5]: 224 [6] One's self appears in the mid-1500s, and is written as one word from about ...
The generic pronouns one and the generic use of you are sometimes called indefinite. These are uncontroversial pronouns. [12] Note, however, that English has three words that share the spelling and pronunciation of one. [2]: 426–427 determiner: I have one book; I'll have one too. noun: one plus two is three; pronoun: if one considers oneself ...
The most commonly encountered possessive forms of the above pronouns are: one's, as in "One should mind one's own business." those derived from the singular indefinite pronouns ending in -one or -body: nobody's, someone's, etc. (Those ending -thing can also form possessives, such as nothing's, but these are less common.)
(The pronoun one is an exception, as in I like those ones.) English pronouns are also more limited than common nouns in their ability to take dependents. For instance, while common nouns can often be preceded by a determinative (e.g., the car), pronouns cannot. [7] In English conversation, pronouns are roughly as frequent as other nouns.
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 ...
Suppletion (the use of the one word as the inflected form of another word): Serbo-Croatian: čov(j)ek "man" (singular) – ljudi "men, folks" (plural) [321] English: person (singular) - people (plural) (used colloquially. In formal and careful speech persons is still used as the plural of person while people also has its own plural in peoples.)
An indeterminate pronoun is a pronoun which can show a variety of readings depending on the type of sentence it occurs in. The term "indeterminate pronoun" originates in Kuroda's (1965) thesis and is typically used in reference to wh-indeterminates, which are pronouns which function as an interrogative pronoun in questions, yet come to have additional meanings with other grammatical operators.
The re-use in some languages of one personal pronoun to indicate a second personal pronoun with formality or social distance – commonly a second person plural to signify second person singular formal – is known as the T–V distinction, from the Latin pronouns tu and vos.