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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 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 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.
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.)
In some cases personal pronouns can be used in place of indefinite pronouns, referring to someone unspecified or to people generally. In English and other languages the second-person pronoun can be used in this way: instead of the formal one should hold one's oar in both hands (using the indefinite pronoun one ), it is more common to say you ...
In other words, the NP-analysis has to reach to additional stipulations to account for the fact that combinations like *the them are impossible. A difficulty with this reasoning, however, is posed by indefinite pronouns (one, few, many), which can easily appear together with a determiner, e.g. the old one. The DP-analysis must therefore draw a ...